Supreme Court Rejects Trump Bid to Set Aside 20,000 California Ballots, With No Dissents
A one-line, unsigned order on the eve of the midterms denies the Justice Department's emergency request to force California to quarantine mail ballots from voters it calls noncitizens.
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration's emergency request to force California to set aside mail ballots from about 20,000 people the government alleges are noncitizens, delivering a rebuke two days before the midterm elections.
The order was a single unsigned line, and no justice noted a dissent. The court acted only on the Justice Department's application for an injunction and did not ask California officials to file a response first. It gave no reasoning.
The ruling ends the administration's last legal avenue in the dispute before Election Day. A divided federal appeals court, the 9th Circuit, had already refused to order the ballots set aside. Days earlier, U.S. District Judge David Carter had turned down a request for a temporary restraining order, writing that the administration's process for identifying the alleged noncitizens was "rife with uncertainty and errors."
The fight began when the administration sent letters to all 58 California counties containing lists of people it said were not citizens and demanding that their ballots be set aside rather than counted. State and local election officials questioned the accuracy of the lists and warned that eligible citizens could be disenfranchised if the ballots were quarantined. More than 6 million mail ballots had been returned in California, a state with over 23 million registered voters.
The case is one of several in which the Justice Department has pressed election claims in the closing days of the campaign. The department has brought criminal charges against more than 200 people it alleges illegally voted in past elections. In Washington state, federal prosecutors demanded that mail ballots from more than 400 alleged noncitizens be set aside, and Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the list included "many" people who are in fact U.S. citizens.
President Trump has repeatedly said that noncitizens vote in significant numbers. Confirmed cases of noncitizen voting are rare. The administration's critics point to that rarity, and to the questions about the lists, as reasons the ballots should be counted.
The Supreme Court's refusal arrived a day after a separate setback for the administration. A federal judge on Sunday dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit that sought to block Alaska from certifying its Senate results if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Mary Peltola.
Because the order is a denial of emergency relief and not a decision on the merits, it does not settle every legal question about how states may verify citizenship. It does mean California's counties will count the contested ballots under the state's normal rules, with Election Day arriving Tuesday.
