The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to immediately order California to set aside ballots from more than 20,000 people the Justice Department claims may be noncitizens who illegally cast votes.
The appeal is the latest twist in a fast-moving legal dispute over midterm votes playing out before crucial contests Tuesday that will determine control of the House and Senate.
“Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” the Trump administration wrote in its appeal. “The only way to preserve the district court’s ability to grant relief to the United States after a full merits proceeding, therefore, is to segregate the challenged ballots now.”
A divided panel of the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned aside the Trump administration’s emergency request to segregate the ballots on Friday.
“Major concerns remain that granting the United States’ requested relief might result in immense hardship to Defendants and harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy,” the majority wrote.
Judges Mark J. Bennett, an appointee of President Donald Trump, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, an appointee of President Joe Biden, declined to issue the injunction. Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, a Trump appointee, said he would have granted it.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Los Angeles also denied the request last month.
The Justice Department took the unusual step of suing California in mid-October, asking a federal judge to bar the state from counting certain ballots until it could be determined whether the voters are citizens or not.
Administration officials said they determined those voters were likely noncitizens after comparing names from a list it obtained to federal citizenship data. California mails ballots to every registered voter, but it’s unclear how many people on the Justice Department’s list were sent ballots — as well as how many have returned them so far.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and election officials have pushed back on the claims, saying it appears many people on the list are U.S. citizens or did not have active voter registrations.
The Justice Department sought an immediate order from a federal judge requiring any ballots from those voters to be set aside. When it didn’t get one, it asked an appeals court for one.
In addition to filing its lawsuit, the Justice Department recently sent letters to county election officials in California asking them to provide the Social Security numbers, voter registration applications and driver’s license information for people on its list so it could make further determinations about their citizenship status. It warned them not to count ballots from the people on the list, saying the officials “risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime” if they do.
The Justice Department also has issued subpoenas to some California election officials in an expansion of its investigation. On Thursday, Carter said he would appoint a special master to examine the Trump administration’s claims that California had thousands of noncitizens on its voter rolls.
The dispute began in October when the Justice Department sent the Los Angeles County registrar a thumb drive with the names of what it identified as potential noncitizen voters and demanded he agree to not count those votes unless he could prove the people in question were citizens.
Two days later, the Trump administration sued.
“At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) wrote in a court filing. “At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”
The Justice Department on Friday under a court order turned its list of nearly 21,000 suspected noncitizens over to an immigrant rights group, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
Data scientists working with the group say they found about 9,000 people on the Justice Department list — more than 40 percent — are not on the state’s rolls of 23.2 million registered voters.
The data scientists, Matt Barreto and Michael Rios of the University of California at Los Angeles, said they also found dozens of instances in which identifying information for people on the list precisely, or nearly, matched people they know to be citizens.
Such examples “represent the tip of the iceberg of disenfranchisement in California” because there is no central database of all U.S. citizens, making it impossible to fully analyze the Justice Department’s list, they wrote.
The case is one in a series of aggressive legal maneuvers the Trump administration has taken ahead of the election alleging likely voter fraud. Last week, the Trump administration told Washington state that it had identified 400 possible noncitizens on its voting rolls and that those ballots should be set aside.
The administration said it would “have no choice but to seek emergency relief” if state officials did not act.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs (D) said a preliminary review found some voters on the list were citizens and others had inactive voter registrations. He called the list “not reliable.”
Immigrant advocacy groups sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to block officials from forcing the state to set aside the ballots.
Separately, the Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit seeking to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses his reelection bid. The Justice Department argued a loss by Sullivan could be because a candidate with a nearly identical name, Dan J. Sullivan Jr., is also on the ballot. Also running is Democrat Mary Peltola.
A federal judge threw out the case on Sunday. The Justice Department is appealing the decision.
The Justice Department has also issued subpoenas as part of an investigation of the second Sullivan’s candidacy. Alaska’s Republican governor and Republicans in the House said they were probing the allegations as well.
In a third case, unions, the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens sued to block the administration from threatening to prosecute state and local election officials over their handling of ballots.
U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, found on Friday that the threats violated the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s elections clause.
“Defendants’ intimidation, threats, and attempts at coercion force election workers daily to choose between acceding to Defendants’ unlawful demands or adhering to their duties and thereby subjecting themselves to a serious risk of criminal investigation and prosecution,” Thompson wrote in her opinion.
The post Trump administration asks Supreme Court to set aside 20,000 California ballots for now appeared first on Washington Post.
