Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Set Aside 20,000 California Ballots
Seven Lights
The Supreme Court on Monday refused the Trump administration’s emergency request to force California election officials to set aside mail ballots cast by some 20,000 people the government alleges are likely noncitizens. The court issued a one-sentence, unsigned order denying the injunction. It contained no explanation and carried no noted dissents.
The Justice Department had asked the court to intervene days before the midterm election. Its appeal went to Justice Elena Kagan, who oversees the Ninth Circuit, and was acted upon at once. Acting Solicitor General John Sauer argued the government’s lawsuit would be “moot” unless the court intervened promptly and that the ballots must be “segregated” before processing and counting.
The administration had already lost at every lower level. US district judge David Carter in Los Angeles rebuffed a request for a temporary restraining order last week, finding the government’s process for identifying alleged noncitizens “rife with uncertainty and errors”. The administration lost twice at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose judges held that the Constitution reserves authority over elections to the states and Congress, not the executive, and that the complaint came too late for this election.
The dispute began in mid-October, when federal officials gave California and Los Angeles County a 48-hour deadline to begin setting aside ballots from about 20,000 voters the administration said may not be citizens, and sent letters listing alleged noncitizens to all 58 of the state’s counties. State officials said the lists appeared to be filled with errors and that setting the ballots aside could disenfranchise legal voters. The Justice Department has separately brought criminal charges against more than 200 individuals it alleges voted illegally in past elections.
Voting in California has been underway since early October. More than 6.4 million ballots had been cast as of Sunday, according to Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office, out of more than 23 million registered voters.
California and other states had urged the court to leave the case alone, warning that late federal intervention could throw the counting of millions of ballots into confusion. Governor Gavin Newsom responded to the order with a single line: “Justice is served.”