My fellow Californians, let’s start with an intelligence test.
Our great state has been voting since the beginning of October. People mailed in their ballots, dropped them off at collection sites and even showed up at centers in person.
So raise your hand if you know — or even just assume — that election officials did something with those ballots when they arrived, other than just tossing them into a pile.
Congratulations, raise your hand. You are now officially smarter than the entire US Department of Justice. Or at least, more honest.
On Sunday, DOJ lawyers managed to convince a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to call a rare emergency hearing because, OMG, people are actually voting and California is processing ballots!
Who could have known?
Although the law requires counties to count ballots in a timely manner; even though this has happened in every other election; even if the daily count of ballots received is posted online by the Secretary of State; even though there are live cameras of ballots being processed in Los Angeles – somehow the US government didn’t know this normal election procedure was taking place, he claimed.
It was not until late Friday that DOJ lawyers read a brief filed by California DOJ lawyers indicating that Los Angeles is, in fact, opening of postal ballots, that the US DOJ realized that the ballots are currently opening. About 600,000 so far in Los Angeles
It seemed “absurd on its face,” California Assistant Attorney General Samuel P. Siegel argued.
Armed with this previously unknown information, Trump’s lawyers were pleading with the appeals court to take their flimsy and constitutionally questionable case back from the judge who had already promised to rule on their requests Tuesday and immediately give them an injunction to pursue their election conspiracy claims.
Most people know the background to this drama, but here’s a quick recap.
For years, President Trump has falsely but continually claimed that Democrats are colluding with undocumented people to help them sneak into the country in exchange for voting illegally for Democrats in droves. This is not the case, but the president is obsessed with this conspiracy, so much so that he is using the Justice Department as a weapon to attack states, particularly California, in an attempt to prove his delusions correct and, perhaps, as a bonus, to undermine democracy.
A few months ago, the DOJ visited the state of California and claimed it had a list of 190,000 people it believed were illegally registered to vote. That list has since shrunk to 20,000. But with all the investigative power of the government working hard on this case, only 28 people in California have been indicted by the federal government during this no-holds-barred effort, and it appears not all of those cases will hold up.
Undeterred, Trump’s lawyers tried to get a California judge to order the state (and Los Angeles) to throw out the ballots they claimed to have doubts about. They asked the judge in that case for a temporary restraining order requiring Los Angeles County to do so, and the judge agreed to rule on that request early next week, in an already expedited manner.
But then Trump’s lawyers learned of all this handling of votes and asked the judge to rule by Saturday afternoon — although the reasoning here seems uncertain. When the federal judge overseeing the case failed to rule on Saturday, an absurd request that didn’t even give the attorneys enough time to file their briefs, the feds ran to the 9th Circuit, claiming that failing to rule on Saturday was a de facto denial of their request.
Basically, it appears that Trump’s lawyers were arguing about two things. First, once ballots are counted, they cannot be counted again, and if there are illegal ballots, it harms all voters. Sure, okay.
But again, there’s no evidence that this is happening on a widespread basis, and lists of potential vote violators compiled by the government have been found to be riddled with errors. They could also involve using a mysterious non-governmental “third party” to gather information that even Trump’s lawyers could not identify on Sunday.
DOJ lawyers also claimed that they had just learned that once a ballot was removed from the envelope, there was no way to reconnect that ballot to the voter who cast it — because our votes are anonymous. It was therefore necessary to seize the 20,000 ballot papers before separating them from the documents they contained.
The lawyers did not explain why they needed to know how one person voted to confirm that they had voted illegally. The envelopes are kept by county elections officials, but apparently Trump’s lawyers believe it is essential to tie them to particular votes.
But here’s the problem: There simply aren’t enough illegal voters to influence an election in Los Angeles, or California for that matter. We currently have a system to detect problematic ballots, as well as a separate criminal system that can hold illegal voters accountable. Two weeks before an election is not the time to demand that ballots be withheld – unless you’re trying to undermine confidence.
The appeals judges appeared unimpressed with the federal lawyers’ arguments, repeatedly questioning whether the 9th Circuit even had jurisdiction since states are in charge of elections, not the federal government. There was even a reading of the 10th Amendment. You know, the one the don’t-tread-on-me types love, which says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited thereby to the States, are reserved to the States.” »
We should expect a decision sooner rather than later, but the real question remains: why the urgency? The DOJ is involved in another voting lawsuit in Washington, D.C., where plaintiffs, led by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, have sought their own restraining order to prevent the government from creating national lists of who it says should vote, and using secret and shaky information gathering to do so.
It is also true that the original case was transferred from a Trump-appointed judge to a Bill Clinton-appointed judge. There has been speculation that this change might have been viewed unfavorably by the federal government, even though Clinton-appointed judge David O. Carter was assigned the case because of his experience in the matter.
DC’s restraining order could be decided in the coming days. I’m not saying the cases are related, or that the judge should or does matter, but the argument for Trump’s California DOJ is essentially that its list of 20,000 people is really solid, reliable information.
If the federal judge in Washington first rules that the collection of government information is potentially both excessive and sloppy, it will be that much harder for another judge, or the appeals court for that matter, to decide that the list is so critical that it must intervene.
So maybe there’s an emergency.
But not the one the government claims.
Gn usa
