Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Set Aside California Mail-in Ballots
Appeals panel had expressed skepticism of claims of noncitizen voting, in a rare weekend court hearing
A federal appeals court Monday rejected a Trump administration request to immediately require California to set aside mail-in ballots it receives from 20,000 people the federal government says might not be U.S. citizens.
A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Justice Department wasn’t entitled to an emergency order segregating the ballots, in a case the DOJ just filed 11 days ago and hasn’t yet been considered by a trial judge.
The panel said the administration’s “claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one” and that it could have filed its lawsuit earlier in its monthslong battle with California over the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls.
The order came after an unusual Sunday hearing in which judges grilled a Justice Department lawyer about the timing of the agency’s suit and the administration’s claims about noncitizen voting.
One of the appeals court judges who ruled against the administration, Trump appointee Mark Bennett, said the Constitution gives California the power to manage its voter rolls and run its elections.
The other judge in the majority was Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, who during the hearing questioned the reliability of the Trump administration’s claims that up to 20,000 ballots could be cast by “likely noncitizens.”
Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented, saying the federal government was entitled to a ruling in its favor because it “has a sovereign interest” in stopping illegal voting and California wasn’t helping.
Voting is already under way in California, where every active registered voter receives a mail-in ballot. The state also begins processing those ballots ahead of Election Day—although it doesn’t actually count them until the polls close. Trump seized on California’s slow ballot-counting in the state’s summer primary to call into question the validity of the results.
U.S. Justice Department lawyer Matthew Donnelly said in the Sunday hearing that the administration needed an injunction “as soon as possible, based on the amount of votes that are being processed as we speak.”
Trump and top administration officials have alleged that hundreds of thousands of ineligible people are registered to vote around the country, focusing especially on people they think to be noncitizens.
California has said that it prohibits noncitizens from voting, and that state voters had to repeatedly attest to their U.S. citizenship to cast ballots.
The Trump administration faces a major obstacle to proving noncitizens are participating in elections: Because states compile and maintain voter rolls, only they have complete information about who is registered and actually casts ballots.
A federal judge in Santa Ana, Calif., the Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge David Carter, is set to hear arguments Tuesday on whether to block the ballots from being counted. Whatever Carter rules is likely to be appealed back to the Ninth Circuit.