Election Eve in the Courts: A Federal Judge Bars the Trump Administration From Demanding California Segregate Suspected-Noncitizen Ballots, as the Justice Department Asks the Supreme Court to Hold 20,000 Votes
Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the administration's lists were flawed and that California decides its own citizenship-verification procedures. Hours earlier, the Justice Department had asked the Supreme Court to stop California counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 listed voters until each is verified.
The fight over who runs America's elections reached two federal courts on the same Election Eve. A US judge ordered the Trump administration on Monday to stop demanding that California election officials segregate ballots cast by people on its lists of suspected noncitizens, Reuters reports. US District Judge James Boasberg found that the lists the administration had compiled were flawed, and included many people who were wrongly listed as noncitizens. "California may decide for itself what procedures to use for verifying the citizenship of registered voters," Boasberg wrote, in the passage Reuters quotes. "The Executive Branch lacks authority to unilaterally impose its preferred procedures." The ruling comes a day before the November 3 midterm elections, with Republicans battling to maintain majorities in both houses of Congress.
The same dispute was already in front of the Supreme Court. Earlier Monday, the administration asked the justices to temporarily block California from counting mail-in ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters who federal officials allege are likely noncitizens, and to order California to separate any ballots cast by people on the list until those voters are verified as citizens. The list of 20,000 voters was amassed by the Department of Homeland Security and sent to California officials and to Los Angeles County. The Justice Department sued in federal court on October 15, claiming California is unlawfully preventing enforcement of a 1996 law that makes it a criminal offense for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. California has said its safeguards are robust and that the lawsuit threatens to deprive 20,000 people of their right to vote based on vague accusations. A federal appeals court refused the administration's request on Friday, emphasizing the state's power over election procedures; US District Judge David Carter had denied it on October 28, raising concerns over the reliability of the administration's data and noting that people flagged as noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have repeatedly turned out to be naturalized US citizens.
For New Jersey, the stake in this California case is the principle being litigated, and one concrete sentence in Reuters' reporting: the Justice Department has told election officials in all 50 states that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to remain on their rolls or cast ballots — a warning this desk covered when it reached New Jersey's own registration dispute (SQ-20261102-031). The Constitution assigns the administration of elections to the states, and the courts that have ruled so far in this fight — a district judge in Los Angeles, the 9th Circuit, and now Judge Boasberg in Washington — have each sided with the state. A Reuters investigation published in July found just 129 cases in which noncitizens had been charged with voting illegally since the 1996 law passed. The Supreme Court has not been reported to act on the emergency request, and Election Day is tomorrow: California's 52 House seats are the largest bloc in a chamber where Democrats need a net gain of four seats, and New Jersey's twelve seats will be counted under the same state-run system the judges in this case have, so far, defended.
