Federal Court Halts Bid to Split 20,000 California Ballots

Judge David Carter denied the Justice Department's emergency motion on Wednesday, stopping a federal effort to force California to segregate 20,000 ballots from voters the administration labeled as non-citizens. The decision rejects a legal maneuver that critics say was timed to create uncertainty in the upcoming midterm elections.

The dispute began roughly two weeks ago when the Justice Department delivered USB drives to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento. The drives contained lists of 20,000 names that the federal government claimed belonged to non-citizens registered on state voter rolls. California has more than 23 million registered voters, and instances of non-citizen voting are historically rare.

The department gave local officials a 48-hour window to review the lists and threatened litigation if they did not set aside the corresponding ballots. Carter noted in his ruling that the executive branch sought to override state procedures on the eve of an election. "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," Carter wrote.

Los Angeles officials found preliminary errors in the federal lists. They identified voters who were no longer on the rolls and received insufficient data to verify citizenship status. The Justice Department filed its lawsuit on October 15, seeking to compel the state to sequester the ballots and verify the citizenship of the listed individuals.

The administration also threatened to prosecute local election officials if they counted ballots from non-citizens. Sam Trepel, a former Justice Department prosecutor, argued in a recent blog post that such a prosecution would lack a legal basis. Following the initial filing, the department began sending similar lists of suspected non-citizen voters to other counties in the state.

The Justice Department attempted to bypass Carter by appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Federal lawyers argued that Carter was not moving quickly enough on the emergency motion. A panel of appellate judges ruled 2-1 against the department earlier this week, keeping the case in district court.

Legal experts questioned the timing of the federal action from the start. The Department of Homeland Security announced in July that it had identified up to 190,000 non-citizens on California voter rolls. The agency did not share detailed data with state officials until after ballots had already been mailed to voters.