A federal judge refused to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were noncitizens, rejecting a legally thin request from the Justice Department that appeared intended to sow doubt about the results of the midterm elections.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge David Carter, appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the Justice Department handed over a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the state. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.
“This case concerns the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election,” Carter wrote in his ruling Wednesday evening. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to force a state and local government to abandon its own constitutional election procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch. »
“By filing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as sole sovereign,” Carter continued. “But California and its people are also sovereign.”
The Justice Department gave authorities only 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if authorities did not sequester the ballots of those whose citizenship it could not confirm. The department declined to provide more details about its methodology, and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators that the list was inaccurate. The Justice Department then sued California on October 15 in an attempt to force the state to sequester ballots and verify citizenship.
If the Justice Department’s request were granted, Carter wrote, it would likely violate a 1993 law that requires states to remove ineligible voters from their official rolls no later than 90 days before an election.
California election officials said they could not verify the citizenship of people on the agency’s list before Election Day. Carter blasted the Justice Department’s directive because it risked disenfranchising thousands of voters. “In effect, a segregated ballot would amount to a suppressed ballot,” Carter wrote.
The Justice Department also threatened to sue state election officials if they tabulated non-citizen ballots. Such a move would have no legal basis, Sam Trepel, a former Justice Department prosecutor, wrote in a blog post this month. After filing a lawsuit, the Trump administration began providing other counties with lists of presumed non-citizen voters. When election officials began reviewing them, they found that the department had flagged voters who were not on the rolls and had not provided enough information to verify their citizenship status, according to CalMatters.
Carter’s decision came after the Justice Department attempted to circumvent him altogether. After Carter set an Oct. 27 hearing on the Justice Department’s emergency motion, the department took the unusual step of appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, saying Carter was not reviewing the case quickly enough. A panel of Ninth Circuit judges ruled 2-1 against the Justice Department earlier this week.
Legal experts have been skeptical of the Justice Department’s efforts in California from the start. In July, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it had identified up to 190,000 non-citizens on California’s voter rolls. DHS did not provide more details to the state until after the state voted.
“Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable. Once a vote is separated, lasting damage occurs. If the executive branch can discard votes and threaten ongoing elections because of unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” Carter wrote in his Wednesday opinion. “This Court refuses to be a party to any such process.”
Uwa Ede-Osifo contributed reporting
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