WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to force California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots associated with voters federal officials suspect may be noncitizens, handing the Justice Department another defeat in its Election Day challenge.
The court issued a brief order declining to intervene, with no justices publicly dissenting. The ruling allows California to continue processing and counting the disputed ballots under its existing election procedures.
The Justice Department had argued that ballots connected to people on its federal list should be segregated until their citizenship could be verified. Solicitor General D. John Sauer warned that once ballots were removed from identifying envelopes and mixed with other votes, any ballot later determined to have been cast illegally could no longer be identified.
California opposed the request, arguing that the federal list contained significant errors and that imposing a new ballot-segregation procedure at the last minute could disenfranchise lawful voters and disrupt an election already underway.
Those concerns were reinforced by an analysis from the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which found that 8,880 of the 20,930 names on the Justice Department list, about 42%, could not be matched to California’s voter rolls. Researchers also identified confirmed U.S. citizens and thousands of people who appeared likely to be naturalized citizens. The Justice Department disputes that analysis.
The administration had already lost before a federal district judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Lower courts questioned both the reliability of the federal data and the Justice Department’s authority to require California to alter its election procedures immediately before voting concluded.
The Supreme Court’s action does not resolve the broader legal dispute over the administration’s noncitizen-voter initiative. Separate litigation over federal voter lists, subpoenas and Justice Department demands remains active. But for the Nov. 3 election, California will not be required to isolate the approximately 20,000 ballots identified by the federal government.
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