A federal judge on Wednesday refused to order California to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters, rejecting a Justice Department demand made six days before the midterm elections. The California noncitizen ballots ruling was issued by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter.
Carter refused to order the seizure of ballots from more than 20,000 California voters whom the Justice Department said might not be citizens. According to The Hindu, Carter called the move brazen pre-election interference. In his written decision, Carter wrote: "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," according to Al Jazeera.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit on October 15. According to the Guardian, the department had given officials 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue if the ballots were not sequestered. Carter wrote that the request would likely violate a 1993 law requiring states to remove ineligible voters from official lists no later than 90 days before an election, the Guardian reported.
The federal government had earlier accused California of having 190,000 illegal voters, then revised that figure to 20,000, according to The Hindu. That 190,000 figure is reported by The Hindu alone.
The Justice Department swiftly appealed Carter’s decision to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera reported that the department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
California election officials have said they cannot verify the citizenship of those on the list before election day. Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators that the list was inaccurate, according to the Guardian.
The case is part of a wider federal effort. According to Reuters, as cited by Al Jazeera, the Trump administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas for records on tens of thousands of voters in at least 13 states.
Similar lists have shifted in other states. In Nevada, the administration initially identified 16,000 noncitizen voters, a figure that fell to 185 and then to zero after verification, according to The Hindu. Studies repeatedly show that while rare cases of voter fraud exist, such incidents are minuscule and do not influence election results, The Hindu reported.
Several points remain unclear. Al Jazeera reports a claim from Democracy Docket that one in four Los Angeles County voters on the list were born in the United States, but this has not been independently confirmed. Democracy Docket’s whistleblower claim about nationwide scrutiny comes from a court filing that Al Jazeera described secondhand, and the filing itself was not reviewed. The Guardian reports a separate 2-1 panel ruling against the department earlier in the week, which Al Jazeera does not mention, so the status of the Ninth Circuit appeal is unclear. The Hindu and Guardian excerpts were partial, so full methodology for the list is not available.
The appeal now goes to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The midterm elections are scheduled for November 3.
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This article was written with AI assistance from the published reporting listed above. It is part of the World Brief daily news podcast.