US Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to set aside California ballots on eve of midterms
The US Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration's emergency request to force California to segregate mail ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters federal officials allege may not be citizens, leaving the state's existing ballot procedures in place on election day.
The United States Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-minute emergency request from the Trump administration that would have forced California to set aside mail ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters federal officials allege may not be US citizens. The decision, handed down a day before the 3 November midterm elections, leaves California free to count ballots under its existing procedures as voters decide races that will determine control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The court acted swiftly and without explanation. In an unsigned, one-sentence order, the kind commonly used for emergency applications, the justices denied the Justice Department’s request just hours after it was filed. No justice publicly dissented, and the court did not even ask California to file a response — a step that, when taken, usually signals that an emergency case is being seriously considered. The brevity of the order means it settles nothing about the underlying dispute over California’s voter rolls; it simply refuses the immediate, pre-election intervention the administration sought.
What the administration had asked for was specific. It wanted California to separate any mail ballots associated with people on a federal list of alleged likely noncitizens and to hold them uncounted until each voter’s citizenship could be verified. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in the emergency filing that once the challenged ballots were mixed in with lawful ones, there would be no way to retrieve them. California officials opposed the request, saying the federal list appeared to be filled with errors and that segregating ballots on its basis could effectively disenfranchise lawful voters.
The numbers behind the dispute have shifted as the case has moved through the courts. The federal government initially accused California of having 190,000 unlawful voters on its rolls, then revised the figure to about 20,000 — 20,930 people, according to court filings discussed in coverage of the case. An analysis by the University of California, Los Angeles Voting Rights Project, cited in reporting on the case, found that 8,880 of those 20,930 people, about 42%, did not match anyone in California’s voter file at all, a point California used to argue that the list could not be trusted as a basis for holding ballots aside on the eve of an election.
The Supreme Court’s refusal was the third rejection the administration received in this fight. On 28 October, US District Judge David Carter denied the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped the ballots from being counted, warning that the federal government had never before, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state into abandoning its own constitutional election procedures. On 30 October, a divided panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals also refused the request, with Judges Mark J. Bennett and Gabriel P. Sanchez concluding that forcing California to use the federal list could prevent valid votes from being cast and jeopardise the Los Angeles County election, while Judge Patrick J. Bumatay dissented, calling the government’s request reasonable.
A separate ruling on Monday added to the administration’s setbacks in California. Chief Judge James Boasberg in Washington ruled against the administration’s last-minute demands on California election officials, finding that the executive branch had likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone. The administration has argued that its request was modest and that segregating the ballots would still have allowed lawful votes to be counted eventually, once citizenship was confirmed.
The case sits within a much larger effort by Trump to expand the federal government’s role in running elections, a power the Constitution largely reserves to the states and Congress. Trump has alleged, without evidence, that noncitizens are influencing election outcomes by voting illegally, even though voting by noncitizens in federal elections is already a criminal offence. The Justice Department sued California in October, claiming the state was preventing enforcement of that law. In September, the Supreme Court had already rejected a separate Trump push to restrict mail ballots around the country, although the justices have sided with the administration in a series of other emergency appeals.
For California voters, the practical effect of Monday’s decision is straightforward. The state will not have to create a special system to segregate the ballots identified by the administration before counting, and election officials can continue processing ballots under the procedures they have used throughout an early-voting period that began in early October. With all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships at stake nationally, California’s large delegation makes its procedures a matter of national attention, and the court’s refusal removes one source of last-minute uncertainty from the count.
Reaction to the decision split along familiar lines. For California and voting-rights advocates, it is a significant victory in an extraordinary dispute that reached the nation’s highest court within hours of polling day, confirming that a state cannot be forced to rewrite its ballot procedures on the basis of an unverified list. For the administration and its supporters, it is another defeat in an election-eve legal campaign, and it leaves unresolved their broader claim that California’s rolls contain voters who should not be there — a claim that may still be pursued through the underlying lawsuit, even though the emergency attempt to change how Tuesday’s ballots are handled has now failed.
What happens next will play out in two places at once. In California, counting will proceed under existing rules, and any disputes will turn on the ordinary processes for verifying individual ballots rather than on a mass segregation order. In Washington, the underlying challenge to California’s voter rolls could continue, and the administration could return to the courts with a fuller record if it believes it can prove its claims about specific voters. Neither path guarantees a particular outcome: a fuller case could persuade a court where an emergency filing could not, or it could collapse if the list’s errors prove as extensive as California contends. For now, though, the court has spoken on the only question that mattered before election day — whether California must set these ballots aside — and its answer was no.
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