Here’s a hot take: The outcome of the 2026 midterms is unlikely to turn on close races in California. California has no statewide races that are expected to be close, and it is a solid blue state that recently redrew its US House maps to maximize Democratic gains.
So it’s a bit baffling that the Trump administration’s final bid to get the Supreme Court to interfere in the midterms, at least before Election Day, focuses on California. On Monday, the eve of the election, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department asked the justices to order California to “segregate” as many as 20,000 ballots and place them in a special pile where they may never be counted.
The case emerges out of a list of over 20,000 names that the Trump administration first sent to California on October 13, asking election officials to separate their ballots and verify the voters’ eligibility. The administration claims that these individuals are “likely” noncitizens, but that they are nonetheless registered to vote in California.
But it is unlikely that many — or even, potentially, any — of the names on this list are actually noncitizens who are registered to vote in California. Shortly after receiving Trump’s list, Los Angeles County officials took a sample of 200 names from the list to see if they are actually noncitizens who appear on the state’s voter rolls. In their preliminary review, they determined that nearly 40 percent of the names on the list belong to people who were born in the United States (and thus are almost certainly US citizens), and that 56 percent of the individuals on the list either canceled their registration or their registration is no longer active. Over 70 percent have never voted in California.
Again, this is only a preliminary review. It is likely that further investigation will determine that even more of these individuals are either citizens or not actually registered to vote in California.
This high error rate, moreover, closely mirrors a similar drama that played out earlier this year in Nevada. The Trump administration initially claimed that as many as 16,000 noncitizens appear on that state’s voter rolls, but when they later flagged a list of supposed noncitizen voters for Nevada officials, only 185 names appeared on the list. Nevada later determined that all 185 of these individuals are, in fact, citizens.
So Trump wants the Supreme Court to interfere in the 2026 midterms based on a list of 20,000 names that is completely unreliable, and that may not identify a single actual person who is both registered to vote in California and a noncitizen. And even if all 20,000 of these individuals did cast a vote in the upcoming midterms, moreover, it is unlikely that they would change the result of any election. Just shy of 11 million people voted in California’s 2022 midterm elections, so the 20,000 people identified by Trump’s administration are a tiny fraction of the California electorate.
And, on top of that, Trump’s lawyers are not even asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise these 20,000 people — at least not yet. At this early stage of the litigation, Trump’s lawyers merely seek a court order requiring California to set these individuals’ ballots aside to determine if they are citizens or not.
None of what Trump’s lawyers are asking for is legal. But the most striking thing about this case, which is known as United States v. California, is its weakness. Even if the justices agree with the Trump administration’s extra-legal claim that it can require a state to set aside ballots based on a highly dubious allegation that some of those ballots might belong to a noncitizen, that decision is unlikely to change the result of any 2026 election — although it could potentially allow this administration to sow chaos in 2028.
Trump’s legal arguments are garbage
Just in case there’s any doubt, there is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever for the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Trump’s administration.
For starters, Trump’s lawyers rely on a statute which makes it a federal misdemeanor for some noncitizens to vote in a federal election. Notably, nothing in this statute regulates the state of California, or any other state. It does not prohibit state officials from counting any ballot, or require them to segregate any ballots into a special pile. This statute merely empowers the federal government to bring criminal charges against an individual noncitizen who votes illegally.
If the Trump administration actually believes that any of the 20,000 names on its list are noncitizen voters, in other words, then its recourse is to gather enough evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that one of those individuals violated federal law. Then it can charge that individual with a crime and potentially obtain a conviction. The statute simply does not permit federal courts to order segregation of ballots.
Meanwhile, a separate federal law requires states to “complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” So it’s actually illegal for California to comply with a request to remove the supposed noncitizens from its voter rolls, because this request came within 90 days of a federal election.
Additionally, as the Supreme Court said less than two weeks ago in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (2026), federal courts “should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” Trump’s lawyers filed their brief to the justices in the California case on the literal eve of an election.
Finally, as Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, explained in an opinion arguing that Trump must lose this case, it is unlikely that California could comply with an order requiring it to segregate the contested ballots even if it wanted to. The state says that segregating these ballots “would be a logistical and administrative nightmare” because the list “does not contain the information necessary to identify voters; the Registrar has no established system for segregating ballots; and trying to create one now risks shutting down the system the Registrar needs to run the entire election.”
Additionally, Bennett writes, California “also lack[s] the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State.”
Given these flaws in Trump’s case, it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will order California to set aside the contested ballots. And, if Trump somehow does prevail, it is also unlikely that such a decision would change the result of any 2026 race.
That said, in the unlikely event it does happen, a decision favoring Trump in California could allow him to interfere with the 2028 election — because it would enable the Trump administration to harass state election officials by sending them fabricated lists of “noncitizens” that the state would have to scramble to process while it was also trying to run an election.
But it is still unclear what Trump is trying to accomplish by bringing the California case to the justices on the day before an election, when even this Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in Trump’s favor.
If this is the extent of Trump’s efforts to overturn an election that is expected to end badly for his Republican Party, then those efforts are unlikely to amount to anything at all.
The post Trump makes one last attempt to get the Supreme Court to interfere with the midterms appeared first on Vox.
