WASHINGTON- Acting quickly and emphatically, the Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to void the ballots of 20,000 California voters who the administration said might not be citizens.
The justices rejected the emergency appeal without comment or dissent — a rare rebuke for President Trump’s lawyers.
Attorney General D. John Sauer had appealed Monday and said the court must “segregate” those California ballots before they are processed and counted by state and local elections officials.
The appeal went before Judge Elena Kagan, who oversees the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Normally, she could have asked California lawyers to respond.
Instead, the court issued a one-line order: “The request for injunctive relief pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and referred by her to the court is denied.” »
The dismissal comes in a string of losses in the Trump administration’s election disputes in recent days and marks a substantial rebuke to a signature campaign by the president and his supporters to impose the administration’s will in national elections while votes are being counted.
This decision was welcomed by Californian leaders. “I am glad that SCOTUS agrees that Trump’s attacks on California’s elections are UNFOUNDED and UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on X.
“This latest decision should put an end to the administration’s attempt to disrupt California’s elections through emergency court orders. But our work is not done,” said California Atty. » said General Rob Bonta. “We will remain vigilant and continue to fight federal efforts to undermine our democracy. »
The ruling leaves no clear path for the Trump administration’s demands that ballots be spoiled in time to prevent their counting, something Justice Department lawyers appear to acknowledge.
Shortly before the Supreme Court’s order, First Assistant U.S. Attorney. Bill Essayli, the lead Los Angeles prosecutor who argued the case in lower district court, said the government’s suit would be essentially “moot” if intervention was not swift. “Now is the time to act,” he said.
The administration has already lost before a federal judge in Los Angeles and twice before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Those judges said Trump’s lawyers were wrong about the Constitution — that it reserved power over elections to the states and Congress, not the executive branch — and that their complaint came too late for this election.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the administration’s appeal meritless after repeated defeats in lower courts, and called the government’s emergency claim dubious given its own actions in recent days.
“Trump and his administration have never understood what ‘NO’ means, and it seems that after being told ‘NO’ three times in the last week, they still aren’t sure. After waiting over three days on this, they are now asking for ’emergency’ aid on the eve of the election,” Newsom wrote on X. “Just another reason why their claims are false.”
After the Supreme Court’s order, Newsom simply wrote, “Justice is served.”
As of May, more than 23 million Californians were registered to vote, with the number of registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans nearly 2-to-1. Yet Trump claimed last week without evidence that “there were hundreds of thousands of bad ballots, bad votes, in California. Millions, in my opinion.”
More than 6.4 million ballots had already been cast as of Sunday, according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office. These ballots are already counted, according to California law.
In mid-October, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit and said federal courts should require California and Los Angeles County to “scind the mail-in ballots of federally identified individuals who may be noncitizens.”
The suit was filed just days after Justice Department officials gave Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar/Clerk Dean Logan a 48-hour deadline to begin cooperating with federal authorities in voiding the ballots of about 20,000 voters who the administration had determined might not be citizens.
Weber, Logan and many voter advocacy groups and election experts have questioned the reliability of the administration’s list, which was compiled using a mix of election data purchased in California and scraped from commercial platforms, according to administration officials.
County officials and analysts with UCLA’s Voting Rights Project said the lists included U.S. citizens and others who are not registered voters. A Justice Department lawyer, in a separate case Monday, acknowledged that the lists had a “high error rate.”
Lawyers for the state argued that it would be impossible to comply with the administration’s demands while voting is already underway without causing widespread voting disruptions and disenfranchising legitimate voters wrongly listed on the administration’s unreliable lists.
Justice Department officials stressed that they were only asking that flagged voters’ ballots be voided while state and federal authorities worked together to determine whether the voters were citizens — something they said could be accomplished relatively quickly if the state simply complied with its requests to collaborate.
They also said emergency court intervention was needed because California law allows ballots to be counted before Election Day, and once a ballot is cast in person or removed from its mailing envelope, it cannot be separated from the vote total.
Federal law states that within 90 days of an election, authorities cannot “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”
Separately, the Supreme Court has also repeatedly disapproved of “last-minute court-ordered changes” regarding elections.
Usually, federal laws are considered the “supreme law” and take precedence over conflicting state laws. No one disputes that U.S. prosecutors can bring criminal fraud charges against noncitizens who violate a federal law by registering in a state to vote and voting illegally.
But the election rules and procedures are different. The Constitution provides that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each State,” unless Congress acts by legislation to “alter” its regulations.
In their opinion Friday, the 9th Circuit judges referred to this constitutional division.
“If the United States believes that different procedures are necessary for mail voting, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not to the courts,” said Justices Mark J. Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, a Biden appointee.
Dissenting Justice Patrick J. Bumatay, a Trump appointee, called the administration’s proposal to separate the 20,000 ballots a “reasonable request” and a “modest remedy” to the problem of illegal voting.
The majority cited a 2013 opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
“The Elections Clause functions as a default provision,” he wrote. “This gives states responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections,” unless Congress adopts a different rule.
Scalia spoke on behalf of a 7-2 majority that rejected an Arizona law requiring voters to show documentary proof of their citizenship when registering to vote. In the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, Congress declared that voters can register to vote by filling out a form and swearing under oath that they are citizens.
California does the same under state law.
Scalia said federal voter registration law does not allow Arizona to adopt new, stricter rules.
In dissent, conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would go further to protect states from federal election interference.
“Given the states’ exclusive authority to set voter qualifications and determine whether those qualifications are met,” Thomas said, Arizona’s restriction should have stood.
“The Constitution reserves for the states the power to decide who is eligible to vote in federal elections,” Alito added.
Election law experts had criticized the Justice Department’s attempted intervention in California’s election and predicted a defeat at the high court.
“The Supreme Court should and I believe will reject the administration’s last-minute, nervous attempts to interfere in California’s elections,” said Walter Olson of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Mar-a-Lago, which has taken the lead on this issue, needs to get this across its head: Unless and until Congress provides clear legal guidance to the contrary, the Constitution reserves these decisions for the states.”
Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
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