Supreme Court Declines to Set Aside Challenged California Ballots
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to require California to set aside mail ballots from approximately 20,000 voters whose citizenship status the Trump administration has questioned. The emergency decision came a day before the final day of voting in the midterm elections. No justice publicly dissented, and the court did not explain its reasoning.
The Justice Department had asked California to separate the ballots while election officials verified the voters’ eligibility. Administration attorneys said the measure would preserve the ability to count ballots later if the voters were confirmed as citizens. California officials argued that the federal list contained substantial errors and that separating ballots at this stage could prevent eligible voters from having their votes counted.
Lower courts had rejected the administration’s request. A district judge warned that separating ballots during an election already underway would disrupt voting. A divided appeals court upheld that order, with one judge dissenting. In a separate ruling Monday, a federal judge in Washington found that the administration’s last-minute demands on California election officials likely exceeded the executive branch’s constitutional authority over election rules.
The reliability of the federal list has been disputed in court. At a hearing, a Justice Department attorney agreed that it had a high error rate and said the department wanted local registrars’ help verifying the records. A federal prosecutor in Los Angeles said he was confident the listed voters were ineligible, while acknowledging that some entries might be wrong.
California mails ballots to its roughly 23 million registered voters, and voting began in early October. State officials said hundreds of thousands of ballots had already been processed and that identifying and separating the challenged ballots now would be logistically impossible.
The Supreme Court’s order leaves the lower-court decision in place as California continues counting votes. It does not resolve the citizenship status of the voters on the federal list.