Federal Judge Refuses Justice Department Request to Set Aside California Ballots

A federal judge has declined to order California election officials to set aside ballots from voters the Trump administration says are non-citizens. The ruling rejected a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.

US district judge David Carter, who was nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, issued the decision on Wednesday evening. It came roughly two weeks after the justice department handed a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento. The department said the drive held the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state's voter rolls. California has more than 23 million registered voters, and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

"This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election," Carter wrote. "Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch."

He added that the executive branch "would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign." Carter continued: "But California and its people are sovereign, too."

The justice department had given officials only 48 hours to review the list. It said it would sue if they did not sequester ballots from people whose citizenship it could not confirm. The department declined to share more about its methodology, and Los Angeles officials found preliminary signs that the list was inaccurate. The department filed suit against California on 15 October seeking to force the state to sequester the ballots and verify citizenship.

The department has also threatened to prosecute California election officials who tabulate ballots from non-citizens. Sam Trepel, a former justice department prosecutor, wrote in a blogpost this month that such a move would have no legal basis. After the lawsuit was filed, the administration began sending lists of suspected non-citizen voters to other counties. According to CalMatters, officials who reviewed them found the department had flagged people who were not on the rolls and had supplied too little information to check citizenship status.

The ruling followed an attempt by the justice department to go around Carter altogether. After he scheduled a 27 October hearing on the department's emergency motion, it took the unusual step of appealing to the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit, arguing that he was not moving fast enough. A ninth circuit panel ruled 2-1 against the department earlier this week.

Legal experts have doubted the department's efforts in California from the start. In July, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had identified up to 190,000 non-citizens on the state's voter rolls. It did not give the state further details until after ballots had already been sent out.