Federal judge declines to order California to set aside ballots flagged by Trump administration
A federal judge on Wednesday declined to order California election officials to set aside mail ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, The Guardian reported. The judge, David Carter of the U.S. District Court, had been asked to issue an emergency order in the case. NPR and CBS News also reported the denial.
Carter, who was nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, wrote in his ruling that "never before in American history had the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own constitutional elections procedures."
The dispute centres on a list of names. The Justice Department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on California's voter rolls. California has more than 23 million registered voters. The department gave state officials 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue if they did not sequester, meaning set apart and hold separately, ballots from people whose citizenship could not be confirmed.
The department sued California on October 15 to try to force the state to do so. It asked the court to order officials to segregate, rather than cancel, vote-by-mail ballots from flagged individuals while citizenship was reviewed. It also asked that the state confirm the citizenship of the person who sent each segregated ballot. The department's complaint alleges that California is facilitating unlawful voting by knowingly allowing non-citizens to vote.
Officials have raised questions about the list itself. The Justice Department declined to provide more detail about how it built the list, and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indications that it was inaccurate. After the lawsuit was filed, the administration began sending similar lists of suspected non-citizen voters to other California counties. Election officials there reported that the lists flagged people who were not on the rolls and gave too little information to verify citizenship.
The federal government's involvement goes back further. In July, the Department of Homeland Security said it had identified up to 190,000 non-citizens on California's voter rolls. According to reporting, the department did not give California more details until after ballots had already been sent out in the state.
Carter set a October 27 hearing on the department's emergency motion. The department then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, saying the judge was not moving quickly enough. Earlier that week, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled 2-1 against the department. Carter's ruling came on Wednesday.
Separately, the Justice Department has charged 28 foreign nationals in connection with California election crimes.
