The United States Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on October 14.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
A day before Election Day, the Justice Department is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into an unprecedented feud with California over the state’s voter rolls.
The appeal is the department’s latest foray into the state’s election administration, which a federal judge last week called “an attempt at widespread and ongoing election interference by federal officials.”
After that judge, Clinton appointee David Carter, and a divided panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the DOJ’s request to order California to void and stop processing the ballots of thousands of people, the DOJ filed an opinion Monday. that she seeks an injunction from the High Court.
It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will agree to intervene and, if so, whether it will rule before Election Day on Tuesday.
The DOJ says it has identified 20,000 “likely” non-citizens on California’s voter rolls whose ballots should not be counted until their citizenship is verified.
So far, courts have sided with California and Los Angeles County that the federal government’s list is unreliable and that creating a new system to separate ballots while voting is already underway is unworkable.
“There is a significant risk that granting the United States the requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the county’s entire election,” 9th Circuit Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote in their Friday ruling denying the Justice Department’s emergency request.
Both justices cited long-standing legal precedent, known as the Purcell principle, that election rules should not be changed on the eve of an election, as well as the fact that the Constitution gives states the power to hold elections. The notice also cites the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits states from systematically removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election.
The panel’s third judge, Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.
The actual number of ballots in dispute is likely well below 20,000, since county election officials found that many people on the DOJ’s list were not registered voters and did not receive ballots by mail.
Over the weekend, data scientists at the Voting Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, gained access to the DOJ list through a court order in a separate lawsuit and found that 42 percent of the names on the list do not appear on California’s current voter rolls. This analysis also found naturalized citizens on the DOJ list.
The Justice Department’s appeal to the Supreme Court comes as it has escalated its feud with California election officials.
In recent weeks, the Justice Department has sent subpoenas to California election officials and reminded officials that they could be criminally prosecuted for allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.
A federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order late Friday prohibiting the Trump administration from threatening, intimidating or coercing election officials into demanding that they stop processing the ballots of registered voters who the federal government says are ineligible. The federal government appealed this order.
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