Supreme Court declines DOJ request to separate disputed California ballots

The US Supreme Court has declined a Justice Department request to stop California from counting more than 20,000 mail ballots that the federal government said may have been cast by non-US citizens, according to DW and NPR. The decision came just before the state’s midterm voting and left California’s existing ballot-counting procedures in place. The Justice Department sought what it called a limited injunction.

It asked California to stop “commingling suspected illegal ballots with legal ones” while the voting status of people on a federal list was verified. The department’s broader lawsuit, filed in mid-October, had already been rejected by a California district court. The voter list was compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, according to DW.

The federal government alleged that it documented non-citizens on California’s voter rolls, but California defended its election system and argued that the method used to identify possible non-citizens was flawed and contained numerous errors. A filing analysing the list found that thousands of people identified as ineligible appeared to be naturalised US citizens, DW reported. The same report said District Judge David Carter had noted that people flagged as non-citizens on voter rolls in other states had repeatedly turned out to be naturalised citizens.

In rejecting the initial case, Carter warned that singling out ballots could disrupt the election and undermine public confidence. He wrote that allowing the executive branch to discount votes and threaten an ongoing election on the basis of unproven allegations would endanger democracy. The reports do not say whether the Supreme Court issued a written explanation for its refusal to intervene.

The DOJ’s request was made as early voting had already been under way for weeks and hundreds of thousands of California ballots had been processed. NPR described the court action as a last-minute attempt to separate ballots in an unprecedented dispute between the federal government and the state over voter rolls. The case forms part of President Donald Trump’s wider claims that non-citizens are attempting to vote.

DW said those claims have repeatedly been challenged by research and investigations, which have found large-scale electoral fraud to be exceedingly rare. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a prominent Trump critic, had announced election-law experts, poll observers and a voter helpline to respond to alleged intimidation or interference. California is not expected to be a competitive state in the midterm elections, according to DW, but the dispute raised broader questions about the division of authority over US elections.

The state and local governments conduct the voting, while federal intervention is limited by constitutional and legal procedures. The Supreme Court’s refusal means the disputed ballots were not separated under the injunction sought by the Justice Department, but the supplied reports do not resolve the underlying status of individual voters.