Judge rejects Trump officials’ bid to set aside California ballots
By SHAWN HUBLER
A federal judge earlier this week rejected the latest Trump administration attempt to intervene in the midterm elections, denying an effort to force California to immediately set aside 20,000 ballots from people the administration suspects are “likely noncitizens.”
In a scathing ruling, Judge David O. Carter wrote that the administration’s demand for urgent action “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.”
“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch,” wrote Carter, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. “In bringing this lawsuit, the executive would have this court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.”
The Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling. In a social media post, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, framed the request to set aside the ballots as an attempt to safeguard the election.
“Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials. This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution,” he wrote.
Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, applauded the ruling as an “important victory for the rule of law and the right to vote.”
“This fight is not over,” he added. “We will keep fighting to protect California’s elections from unlawful federal interference and get this baseless lawsuit dismissed.”
The ruling, which Carter had signaled at a hearing the previous day, came amid an escalating legal battle between the Justice Department and state election officials as President Donald Trump seeks to demonstrate that huge numbers of noncitizens have voted illegally in U.S. elections. Multiple studies have found such fraud is exceedingly rare.
The decision on Wednesday was just the latest setback in the government’s campaign to disqualify voters it claims are noncitizens. On Sunday, a federal appeals court rejected an administration request to intervene in the case preemptively.
The appellate panel also expressed skepticism at the government’s underlying argument that urgent action was necessary to halt illegal voting before next week’s election, and that state authorities — particularly in Democratic-led parts of the country like California — were uninterested in addressing a potential threat to democracy.
In his ruling, Carter noted that the administration had filed at least 31 lawsuits seeking complete voter rolls from states in federal courts across the country in what federal authorities framed as an effort to root out illegal voting. But Carter wrote that the campaign was “indicative of a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference” on the Trump administration’s part.
“Out of the twenty-six cases that have been decided, the D.O.J. has prevailed in precisely zero,” wrote Carter, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
The administration, the judge added, had even threatened state and local election workers with “federal scrutiny” and legal action if people targeted by the federal government receive or cast ballots on their watch.
Recently, the administration sued to intervene in Alaska’s Senate race if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses. And this week, in a maneuver similar to the case in California, federal authorities asked officials in Washington to set aside hundreds of mail ballots that it said may have been sent to noncitizens in that state. (Steve R. Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state, responded on Wednesday that cooperation would be “irresponsible and illegal” since the list had not been culled using reliable methods and a cursory examination turned up the names of U.S. citizens.)
Essayli has said that state and local authorities could cooperate with the administration’s demands without disrupting the election. The government was not asking to void any ballots, he said, only to set some of them aside until the citizenship of the voters could be verified.
Lawyers for the state and Los Angeles County have asked that the case be dismissed.
Critics view the administration’s campaign as a broader attempt to sway the results of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, in which polls have shown Democrats holding a wide advantage. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part because many of the state and local authorities that administer and supervise elections have refused to comply with demands for access to sensitive voter data.
As a result, the federal authorities have compiled their own databases using public, commercially available information that they have compared with federal records. The process has led to mistakes in some states because public voter rolls do not include unique identifiers like Social Security numbers and because federal immigration records do not always immediately capture changes in citizenship status.
At the hearing on Tuesday on the California case, lawyers for the state and Los Angeles County argued that the administration’s system for identifying potential noncitizen voters was untrustworthy and prone to error, calling it a “recipe for disenfranchisement,” a point that Carter also made in his ruling.
Essayli had said that hundreds of federal workers had used the system to compile the 20,000 names that the Justice Department sent this month to California and Los Angeles voting officials, giving them 48 hours to verify the citizenship or set their ballots aside.
California and Los Angeles County officials replied that the deadline was impossible to meet. The Department of Justice then sued for a temporary restraining order to prevent any ballots sent to those people from being counted.
Shortly after, federal authorities announced they had arrested 28 immigrants throughout the state who they said had registered to vote or voted in California elections before becoming naturalized citizens. All had green cards, and many denied knowingly registering or voting.
California has some 23 million registered voters, and the list in question represents a tiny fraction of them. Investigators have found small numbers of people who have been caught voting illegally in past elections, but in nothing like the numbers necessary to swing a major race.
In the three-hour hearing on Tuesday, Carter said the 28 arrests showed that the Justice Department did not need to set aside ballots to enforce laws against fraudulent voting. “You’ve got a remedy for goodness sakes — go out and indict,” he told Essayli from the bench.
But the prosecutor said the Justice Department’s goal was “not to prosecute hundreds of thousands of people.”
“We want to stop the illegal voting,” Essayli said. “We don’t want to chase it later.”
Lawyers for the state and Los Angeles County pointed out that millions of ballots already have been cast in California.
