Trump administration asks Supreme Court to block California ballots from more than 20,000 voters

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to halt California’s counting of mail-in ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal officials say may not be United States citizens.¹ The Justice Department wants those ballots held back until officials can establish the citizenship status of each person on the disputed list.¹ The request targets a defined group of ballots, not a general suspension of California’s mail voting, and the record does not establish that the listed voters are non-citizens.¹ The case therefore turns on whether ballots associated with the list should be excluded temporarily while individual status checks take place.¹² For voters named on the list, the department’s request would mean their ballots are not counted until their citizenship status can be checked.¹

The department’s Supreme Court petition followed a ruling by the Ninth Circuit that refused to undo a lower federal court order protecting the ballots from the requested restriction.² That appellate decision came three days before the Supreme Court filing, and the petition itself was submitted one day before Election Day.² Earlier, a federal judge had refused the department’s application to separate ballots associated with a list assembled by Homeland Security.² The Supreme Court filing thus sought emergency relief after the administration had already been turned away by the trial court and the appeals court.² The sequence shows that the Justice Department brought its request to the Supreme Court after both the trial judge and the appeals court rejected its efforts to block the ballots.²

The dispute began with a Justice Department lawsuit against California, filed on Oct. 15 in federal court in Los Angeles.² Its complaint asked that state election workers not count ballots attributed to people described as likely non-citizens in the coming federal election before their status was resolved.² The request was an unusual federal intervention in election administration in the weeks before voting, according to the account of the filing.³ A separate account places a judge’s rejection of the temporary halt six days before the midterm elections, while the Supreme Court petition is described as filed one day before Election Day.²³ The lawsuit’s requested remedy would have affected state election officials’ handling of ballots linked to the alleged non-citizens, rather than all ballots in the state.²

Before suing, the department provided Los Angeles County officials with a thumb drive listing voters it said might be non-citizens.² The Guardian’s account says federal officials also delivered a USB drive to election officials in both Los Angeles and Sacramento, describing its contents as names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state rolls.⁴ The accounts describe electronic lists supplied to local election officials, while the lawsuit and emergency request concern whether ballots linked to such names may be counted.¹²⁴ The Justice Department gave officials 48 hours to examine the list and warned that it would sue if they did not set the ballots aside.⁴ The short review window meant local officials were asked to assess the supplied names quickly before deciding whether to set related ballots aside.⁴

The scale of the disputed list is set against a state electorate of more than 23 million registered voters, according to The Guardian.⁴ That comparison describes the list as a small portion of the registered electorate, but it does not establish how many listed people are eligible or ineligible to vote.¹⁴ The Guardian reports that non-citizen voting is extremely rare, while federal law makes voting by non-citizens in federal elections illegal.³⁴ Those points explain why citizenship matters to the dispute, but they do not resolve whether the people on this particular list are citizens.¹³⁴ The comparison places the disputed voters in the context of California’s much larger registered electorate, while leaving the status of individuals on the list unsettled.¹⁴

The list’s reliability is contested: Democracy Docket reported that the method used to create it appeared seriously flawed.³ In Los Angeles County, one in four voters appearing on the list were born in the United States, according to Al Jazeera’s account.³ That figure concerns birthplace among people on the county list; it does not, by itself, determine the citizenship status of every person named there.¹³ California has also challenged the basis of the federal claims, describing its own protections as robust and the department’s underlying information as suspect.³ The county finding and the reported concerns about the list’s creation give context to California’s challenge, but neither fact establishes the citizenship of every listed voter.³

The dispute sits within a broader Justice Department effort: Al Jazeera reports that the department issued more than 100 subpoenas in 13 states while examining alleged non-citizen voting.³ A government whistleblower said scrutiny of voters across the country formed part of a federal inquiry called the Unlawful Voter Initiative.³ The federal activity is broader than the California lawsuit, which concerns ballots linked to a particular list and asks for action by California election officials.²³ The available accounts do not establish that the subpoenas or the wider inquiry produced findings about the individuals named in the California dispute.³ The subpoenas across several states and the California case are both part of the reported scrutiny, but the facts do not connect the broader inquiry’s findings to this particular list.²³

The department’s list followed an earlier Homeland Security announcement in July that it had identified as many as 190,000 non-citizens on California voter rolls.⁴ That earlier number is larger than the more-than-20,000 voters at the center of the present ballot dispute, but the accounts do not explain how the lists relate to one another.¹⁴ The trial judge, David Carter, rejected the department’s attempt to use the Homeland Security list to require ballots to be set aside.² His ruling framed the case around citizens’ voting rights and objected to federal pressure on state and local governments to abandon their established election procedures just before an election.² Because the relationship between the earlier rolls figure and the disputed ballots is not explained, the two reported totals should not be treated as the same group.¹⁴

The Justice Department appealed Carter’s decision to the Ninth Circuit, which declined to grant the department’s request; the Supreme Court petition followed that loss.² The department also threatened prosecution of California election officials if they counted ballots from non-citizens, according to The Guardian’s account.⁴ Former Justice Department prosecutor Sam Trepel said that threatened prosecution lacked a legal basis, as reported by The Guardian.⁴ The immediate question presented by the emergency filing remains whether California may count the disputed ballots before each voter’s citizenship has been verified.¹ The threat was directed at election officials responsible for counting ballots, while the emergency request sought to pause counting until citizenship checks were completed.¹⁴