A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the latest Trump administration attempt to intervene in the midterm elections, denying an effort to force California to immediately set aside 20,000 ballots from people the administration suspects are “likely noncitizens.”
In a scathing ruling that he had signaled at a hearing the previous day, Judge David O. Carter wrote that the administration’s demand for urgent action “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.”
“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch,” wrote Judge Carter, of Federal District Court for the Central District of California. “In bringing this lawsuit, the executive would have this court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.”
The ruling, which federal prosecutors are expected to appeal, came amid an escalating legal battle between the Justice Department and state election officials as President Trump seeks to demonstrate that huge numbers of noncitizens have voted illegally in U.S. elections. Multiple studies have found such fraud is exceedingly rare.
In his ruling, Judge Carter noted that the administration had filed at least 31 lawsuits seeking complete voter rolls from states in federal courts across the country — a campaign that was “indicative of a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference.”
“Out of the twenty-six cases that have been decided, the D.O.J. has prevailed in precisely zero,” the judge added.
Nonetheless, he wrote, federal prosecutors have continued the campaign, pressuring states to scour voter rolls for noncitizens and threatening election workers with “federal scrutiny” and legal action.
Recently, the administration sued to intervene in Alaska’s Senate race if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses. And this week, in a maneuver similar to the case in California, federal authorities asked officials in Washington to set aside hundreds of mail ballots that it said may have been sent to noncitizens in that state. (Steve R. Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state, responded on Wednesday that cooperation would be “irresponsible and illegal” since the list was not reliable and a cursory examination turned up the names of U.S. citizens.)
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Southern California, has said that state and local authorities could cooperate with the administration’s demands without disrupting the election. The government was not asking to void any ballots, he said, only to set some of them aside until the citizenship of the voters could be verified.
Lawyers for the state and Los Angeles County have asked that the case be dismissed.
Critics view the administration’s campaign as a broader attempt to sway the results of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, in which polls have shown Democrats holding a wide advantage. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part because many of the state and local authorities that administer and supervise elections have refused to comply with demands for access to sensitive voter data.
As a result, the federal authorities have compiled their own databases using public, commercially available information that they have compared with federal records. The process has led to mistakes in some states because public voter rolls do not include unique identifiers like Social Security numbers and because federal immigration records do not always immediately capture changes in citizenship status.
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