An appeals court again rejected a Trump administration request to stop California from counting the votes of over 20,000 people the government identified as potential noncitizen voters.
The Justice Department had asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to force California to sequester the ballots and establish a process to verify the citizenship status of those voters before counting them.
In a 2-1 order, the court ruled the DOJ’s emergency request is not as easy as the government purports.
“The United States’s requested relief is simple only in the abstract,” the order says. “As the district court found—and we discern no clear error—there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system.”
Trending
The order also stated that California has the constitutional power to administer its own elections and that state law already prohibits noncitizen voting. To conduct a full audit on the state’s millions of mail-in ballots, based on a list of suspected noncitizens, is not feasible with the time left before election night, the order says.
The DOJ sued California earlier this month after the government gave a letter and a thumb drive listing 20,000 people the DOJ believed could be noncitizens who automatically received a mail-in ballot.
The state’s refusal to comply with the DOJ’s request spiraled quickly into a case that is challenging the Trump administration’s last-ditch efforts to control election administration.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government’s request to segregate a tranche of ballots was delivered too late in the elections process and that its attempts to isolate noncitizen voters lacked credibility, potentially leading to erroneously disenfranchised voters.
In previous arguments before the court, California told judges that segregating ballots would completely change the state’s procedure, likely forcing it to sort out potential noncitizen ballots by hand.
Author
