Trump Urges Supreme Court To Halt California Vote-By-Mail Counting Over DOJ Noncitizen Claims

Supreme Court fight

President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court to force California to set aside potentially thousands of ballots the Justice Department claims may have been cast by noncitizens, as the dispute over vote-by-mail ballots moved into the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals barred the administration from intervening in California’s mail-in ballot counting in a 2-1 decision, and US Circuit Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez issued the ruling that said, "If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts."

The Justice Department told the Supreme Court that it identified some 20,000 people on California’s voter rolls who may be noncitizens, and it asked state officials to set aside any ballots cast by those people and verify their citizenship before counting them.

US Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, "there is no way to get the challenged ballots back," in Monday’s filing.

The appeals court also raised the “Purcell principle,” warning against federal courts weighing in at the last minute to change the rules of an election.

Reporting for this sectionCNN

CHIRLA analysis dispute

The Justice Department defended the accuracy of a list it says contains the names of more than 20,000 presuntos extranjeros no ciudadanos registered to vote in California, and it asked a federal judge to consider whether CHIRLA and its lawyers should face charges for desacato after publishing an analysis. Federal judge James Boasberg allowed CHIRLA to have access to federal data about the 20,000 people, and Boasberg ordered the plaintiffs not to disclose any names and to use only the data to argue whether they had legal grounds to challenge how the federal government uses the list. CHIRLA’s lawyers argued that more than 40% of the people on the list do not appear in California’s voter records, and they also identified 22 people who likely are naturalized citizens while saying thousands of citizens appeared on the list.

The Justice Department said CHIRLA’s analysis had no relevance to the legal grounds for the lawsuit, and it wrote, "El alarde político del informe sobre supuestas imprecisiones". Alberto Lammers of the University of California, Los Angeles, Election Rights Project said, "Los abogados de la parte demandante y sus expertos cumplieron plenamente con las órdenes del tribunal" as the case continued.

Reporting for this sectionIndependent en Español

Midterms and consequences

The Trump administration’s noncitizen voter lists could be used to contest the validity of midterm results, and the Justice Department has sued California to block the state from counting ballots from the list of 20,000 voters. The Justice Department acknowledged sending letters to election officials in five states, California, Washington, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada, and it demanded California not count ballots from about 20,000 registered voters without verifying citizenship. Trump endorsed the warning on social media, writing, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” while a Justice Department spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, said, "Close elections are not rare, and every illegal ballot cancels out the vote of an American citizen," in a statement.

A federal judge in California rejected the Justice Department’s bid to block ballots from 20,000 voters, and the judge said the move would "wreak havoc" on the November 3 elections while questioning the reliability of the list. The dispute also fed into broader legal battles over whether federal courts can order last-minute election changes, and the 9th Circuit’s Friday ruling warned that granting the requested relief carried a "material risk" of disenfranchisement.

Reporting for this sectionThe Straits TimesCNN