A federal appeals court on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s latest bid to force California to set aside ballots from over 20,000 people it alleges might be noncitizens.
The “United States has not made the required showing that such extraordinary relief, during an ongoing election, is clearly required by law,” a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found in a 2-1 ruling.
“As the district court found—and we discern no clear error—there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system.”
The dissenting judge, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, wrote that what the government had been suggesting is a “modest” remedy.
“The federal government and the States can work together. California decided long ago that aliens can’t vote in its elections. Today, the federal government merely seeks to safeguard that decision. We should have let them try,” he wrote.
The majority judges were Mark Bennet, another Trump nominee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden nominee.
It was the second time in a week the appeals court panel had rejected a request from the administration to intervene in the case.
The administration filed suit earlier this month demanding California election officials set aside over 20,000 ballots it contended may have been sent from noncitizens.
In a ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge David Carter found the request “violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections.”
“If Plaintiff’s last-minute request for relief were granted, either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process,” he ruled.
Carter also questioned the administration’s methodology in coming up with its list of names, and noted that the Department of Homeland Security had claimed in July that the number of noncitizens who were registered to vote in California was closer to 200,000.
“Given the vagueness of Plaintiff’s descriptions of its procedures and the unreliability of its similar claims in other states, the Court cannot conclude that Plaintiff’s process is credible,” the judge wrote.
He also pointed to similar claims the administration had made in Nevada, where it had alleged there were 15,903 registered voters as noncitizens. They “later reduced that number to 6,218, and then to 185 after conducting its manual review. Nevada officials later confirmed that all 185 individuals were citizens,” the judge wrote.
In its earlier ruling, the appeals court judges also pushed back on the government’s claim it needed to step in on an emergency basis, saying it was “at least in part, a self-constructed one” because it had waited it until far too close to the election to intervene.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling or whether it planned to file an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, which was involved in defending the case, said in a statement, “The Department of Justice sought to throw out the voices of more than 20,000 Californians without credible evidence and outside the established safeguards that protect voters’ rights.”
“Today’s decision sends a clear message: our elections must be governed by facts, law, and constitutional principles, not political interference or voter suppression,” the statement said.
