The Supreme Court on Monday turned away the Trump administration’s last-ditch request to make California set aside mail ballots from about 20,000 people the Justice Department flagged as likely noncitizens.
The justices denied the emergency application in a one-line, unsigned order with no noted dissents, CBS News reported. As is common on the court’s emergency docket, the order gave no reasoning.
The court moved so quickly that it did not ask California for its views before ruling, a step it normally takes, according to NBC News. The administration had filed its request only hours earlier.
Without a court order, the flagged ballots will be counted along with the rest. NBC noted that California strips identifying details from a mail ballot once its signature is verified, so those votes could not be traced later.
The Justice Department argued that segregating the ballots would preserve them while their eligibility was investigated, without canceling any votes, Fox News reported. It had gone to the high court after the 9th Circuit refused relief Friday.
“Once illegally cast ballots are counted and commingled with lawful votes, the resulting harm is impossible to remedy,” the department wrote. Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented from the appeals court’s refusal.
Judges Questioned the Government’s List
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee, had warned that segregating the ballots would “wreak havoc” on the midterms and erode trust in the democratic process, the Associated Press reported.
“If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” Carter wrote in denying the department’s request last week.
In a separate hearing, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson asked Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Kao whether the list had “a high error rate.” Kao replied, “That’s a fair statement,” adding that registrars’ help was needed to verify the voters.
Bill Essayli, who runs the department’s Los Angeles office, has defended the list. “This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a theory,” he told reporters, though he later conceded it may contain errors.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said the appeal “reeks of desperation and is another attempt to undermine our elections and trample on the rule of law.”
Also on Monday, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington blocked further administration demands on California’s mail ballots, writing that the executive branch “has likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause.”
The ballot dispute has run for weeks, including two 9th Circuit losses for the department. All of California’s roughly 23 million registered voters are mailed a ballot, and CBS reported that more than 6 million had been returned.
Federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Justice Department has charged more than 200 people with voting illegally in past elections. Confirmed cases of noncitizen voting remain rare.
The administration has pressed similar demands elsewhere. Prosecutors asked Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to set aside ballots from more than 400 alleged noncitizens, but Hobbs said “many” people on that list are citizens.
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