The Justice Department on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step into its legal clash with California over 20,000 ballots the government flagged as potentially from noncitizens.
In an application filed just a day before Election Day, the DOJ asked the high court to force California to segregate ballots from those voters while its lawsuit plays out in court.
The DOJ argued that California’s noncompliance violates the federal law that it’s “unlawful for any alien to vote in any election.”
“Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” the DOJ application says. “The only way to preserve the district court’s ability to grant relief to the United States after a full merits proceeding, therefore, is to segregate the challenged ballots now.”
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California election officials have said in court filings they would have to conjure up a system to identify and separate thousands of ballots from being counted and then verify each voter’s citizenship.
The administration says that its request is a “modest remedy.” DOJ argues in the Supreme Court application that the state’s own election laws “contemplate the segregation of challenged ballots, and the segregation of challenged ballots is a standard remedy in election cases.”
In October, the DOJ sent California election officials a letter instructing them to separate or withhold the ballots of any person listed on an attached thumb drive — which California refused to do — and the two sides have been arguing back and forth in court.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has twice rejected the administration’s pleas for ballots to be sequestered and verified.
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