Supreme Court Rejects Trump Administration’s California Ballot Request

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to make California set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots tied to people the Justice Department said were likely noncitizens. The unsigned action came on November 2, hours before Election Day, and left lower-court orders protecting the state’s existing ballot-counting process in place.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, a common practice in emergency applications. The order means California election officials may continue processing the disputed ballots under state procedures rather than attempting to locate and segregate them while voters’ citizenship is checked.

The administration had argued that temporarily separating the ballots was a limited safeguard and would not prevent valid votes from being counted later. California officials countered that the federal list contained significant errors, that some people on it were lawful voters and that pulling individual ballots after voting had begun would be both disruptive and, in some cases, impossible.

The dispute began after the Justice Department gave election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento counties a list of about 20,000 names and demanded rapid verification. State and local officials said the department did not disclose enough about how the list was assembled. During earlier litigation, a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged a high error rate while saying that was why federal officials wanted help from local registrars.

California mails ballots to approximately 23 million registered voters, and voting had been underway since early October. By the time the administration sought emergency relief, hundreds of thousands of ballots had already been processed. State officials argued that changing procedures at the last moment risked delaying results and disenfranchising eligible citizens.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter initially refused the administration’s request, warning that ballot segregation based on unproven allegations could disrupt the election and undermine public confidence. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit then declined to disturb Carter’s order. The administration’s Supreme Court filing was the next attempt to obtain emergency relief.

The Supreme Court’s rejection is a material new step in the same California ballot dispute TrumpInsight covered after the Ninth Circuit ruling. It closes the administration’s immediate path to forcing segregation before voting concludes, although it does not resolve every underlying legal question or prevent later litigation over particular registrations or ballots.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal. Available election data and prosecutions indicate it is rare, while the administration has made identifying potential noncitizen registrations a central election-enforcement priority. In this case, the courts were deciding whether the government’s evidence and timing justified an extraordinary change to California’s procedures immediately before the midterms—not whether every person on the federal list was eligible.

The timing raised the stakes because the November 3 midterms will determine control of Congress for the final two years of Trump’s second term. The Supreme Court’s action preserves the status quo for counting in California while those contests proceed.

Sources and image credit

Reporting: Associated Press via ABC7 Los Angeles; The Guardian. Lower-court record: Ninth Circuit order. Image: “Supreme Court Building, Washington,” by Claire Anderson, via Wikimedia Commons, dedicated to the public domain under CC0.