The Justice Department decided Friday to dismiss its own lawsuit. who was trying to stop California must count around 20,000 ballots he claimed went to non-citizens until their immigration status could be verified.
The request to dismiss the case comes days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing in which a special expert was expected to evaluate the accuracy of the list. California officials have previously said the list was outdated and included legitimate voters — a sentiment the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his scathing order rejecting the federal government’s request.
The case was at the forefront of the Trump administration’s efforts to assert control over state-run elections across the country, which Mr. Trump says are riddled with illegal votes, without providing evidence.
Monday, on the eve of election day, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency call of the Department of Justice to demand that California separate the ballots received from the approximately 20,000 people it claimed were non-citizens.
The Supreme Court rejected the appeal in an unsigned one-line order.
The Justice Department remains embroiled in litigation with immigrant and voting rights groups seeking to limit its use of the list of those it considers presumptive noncitizens. Another controversial lawsuit he filed in Alaska at Mr. Trump’s request before the election to block the Democrat’s victory in that state’s Senate race. was quickly fired by a federal judge. The administration is appealing the decision but has not yet filed a full brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
California had processed about 9 million ballots as of Friday morning, with nearly 5 million still to be counted, according to state election officials. The motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that by the time of the next hearing, the state would have already “irretrievably mixed the challenged ballots with the legal ballots.”
“The assistance sought and needed by the United States is no longer available, making voluntary termination necessary,” the motion states.
Bill Essayli, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, previously argued in court that the lawsuit would be irrelevant after Election Day because there would be no way to sequester those owned by noncitizens. The suit was filed in mid-October, after ballots had been mailed to all 23 million registered voters in the state, and after hundreds of thousands of ballots had already been processed. Once the vote is processed, it is completely anonymized.
Essayli said at the time the complaint was filed that his goal was to “safeguard the integrity of the election so that it does not have an effect on future elections.”
“We want to stop illegal voting. We don’t want to continue it later,” he said in court the week before the election.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California referred all questions to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday evening.
California prosecutors have arrested more than 30 noncitizens in recent weeks accused of illegally registering to vote. Some of those arrested were also accused of having voted in previous elections. Election clerks across California in the week leading up to the election received subpoenas to testify before grand juries scheduled to convene in November. It is not clear who faces criminal charges in these cases, but the department generally does not subpoena to appear before a grand jury people it considers targets of a criminal investigation.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter appointed the special master in late October, shortly after allowing California to proceed with the election as scheduled. Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, argued in his scathing order that separating ballots at this late stage would risk disenfranchisement of citizens and warned it would “wreak havoc” in the midterm elections.
The special master also reportedly examined whether California election officials actually had a mechanism to separate ballots.
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