The Supreme Court on Monday quickly denied the Trump administration’s request to segregate the ballots of 20,000 California voters the federal government suspects are “potential noncitizen voters.”
The one-line order was issued without the justices asking for a response from California officials and without any justices noting a dissent to the denial.
The DOJ application came the day before Election Day and urged the high court to intervene to keep the suspected ballots separate from lawful ones. An election law expert predicted that the Supreme Court would not want to get involved in any last-ditch efforts regarding the midterms.
“They don’t want any part of this nonsense,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told The Washington Sun. “If there were an actual case that involved actual disruptions or actual claims on actual law, maybe, but none of these do.”
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Monday’s decision keeps at lower courts a clash between the DOJ and the state of California over the 20,000 voters. The state received that list in October, and since then has been embroiled in litigation with the federal government over segregating those ballots until the citizenship of those individuals can be confirmed.
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