State Tried to Void 20,000 Ballots; Courts Said No

Twenty thousand Californians nearly had their ballots set aside because a list said so. That list came from the administration of President Donald Trump, and on Friday a federal appeals court told it no for the second time in under a week, with the November 3 midterms four days away.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the request would violate the US Constitution and risk disenfranchising eligible voters. "The consequence of the United States's request is not merely ballot segregation, but ultimately both the cancellation of the ballot and the removal of voters from the voting rolls," the majority wrote. Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez, appointed by Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden respectively, formed that majority. Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay dissented, calling the administration's petition a "reasonable request."

Who Has the Power

The apparatus moved fast and late. The administration sent California its list of 20,000 "likely non-citizens" on October 12, barely three weeks before the election. Three days later, on October 15, it sued to keep those ballots from being counted. When California refused to set the ballots aside and asked for proof that the names belonged to foreign nationals, the state says none was provided.

The administration then went shopping for an emergency order. The 9th Circuit turned it away on Monday, saying lower courts hadn't been given adequate time to weigh the matter. A lower court ruled against the administration on Wednesday. The administration appealed again, and lost again on Friday.

Who Gets Crushed

The people at the bottom of this list are voters, and the list doesn't hold up. Nevada authorities said in September that the administration had erroneously identified citizens as non-citizens on its list. Not a single name was correct, according to the state's statement. Washington received a similar list, and officials there also found the document largely inaccurate.

The Los Angeles Times looked at the 28 foreign nationals the administration charged in California last week with election-related infractions. Some of the accused told the paper they had never registered to vote. The paper's reporting suggested some of the defendants shared the same name as eligible voters.

Trump asserted earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals across the country were registered to vote. Election fraud in the US is extremely rare, and so is non-citizen voting. It's already against the law in all 50 states, including California.

The Election Trap

The ballot is the one piece of power ordinary people are told to trust, and here it needed three judges and two appeals to survive a purge attempt launched by the sitting president's Justice Department. Governor Gavin Newsom called it "a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters." California officials say the administration is seeking to meddle in the state's elections to sow voter distrust and undermine the results.

Notice what the ruling actually rests on. The majority invoked the Constitution's Elections Clause, which grants states exclusive authority to administer elections, and declined "to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution's plain text." The protection came from one tier of government fencing off another. It didn't come from the voters themselves. A single dissenting judge, appointed by the very president making the demand, found the request "reasonable."

California will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives on November 3. Whether those 20,000 people ever believed the system was theirs to begin with is a question no court ruled on.