DOJ Pressures California Over 20,000 Ballots

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter warned the Trump administration to stop threatening state and county election employees as the Justice Department seeks to set aside about 20,000 California ballots from voters whose citizenship it questions. The federal government has warned officials they could face criminal penalties if they count the flagged ballots. That is the pressure point: federal power aimed at local election workers, with eligible voters caught in the machinery.

Who Gets to Count

At a 3½-hour hearing in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Carter said he needed more time to decide whether to block California from counting the ballots and would issue a decision Wednesday. He said, “This court believes it would be wise — that it would be wise — that any threats to state and county elected employees cease immediately.”

Carter questioned how the administration produced its list of voters, saying the method was unclear and asking to develop the record further, including by bringing in a court expert. “What are these systems? What are the algorithms? How did you derive this?” he asked. The proposed intervention would change how California handles ballots while an election is underway.

Carter focused on holding people who illegally voted accountable without disenfranchising eligible voters. He told First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli: “For those who do vote illegally, ‘you’ve got a remedy, for goodness sakes.’ Go out and indict.”

The Justice Department sued California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan on Oct. 15. Two days earlier, Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter had given Weber and Logan 48 hours to set aside ballots from about 20,000 flagged voters, whom he described as “likely noncitizens.”

A Deadline From Washington

The department appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after Carter didn’t meet a deadline the department had set for him to rule on its request for a temporary restraining order. On Monday, the appeals court rejected the government’s appeal, ruling 2-1 that it lacked jurisdiction because Carter hadn’t yet heard the case.

The two judges in the majority, Mark J. Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee, also wrote separately that the case failed on its merits. They said the effort ran afoul of federal law barring interventions in voting immediately before elections and the U.S. Constitution, which reserves control of elections to the states and oversight to Congress, not the executive branch. Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee, dissented, saying the federal government must “have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections.”

Attorneys for Weber and California said the administration had offered no evidence that the 20,000 voters were noncitizens and relied on “data and methods known to be unreliable.” Deputy attorney general Michael Cohen said the administration challenged California’s law allowing voters to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury, while ignoring that Congress set that standard.

Anne Bellows, another deputy attorney general, said the federal government wanted to replace California’s election framework with “a new, unclear procedure” in which it could issue a list and require the state to change how some ballots are received and tabulated. She called it a “recipe for disenfranchisement” of thousands of legitimate voters. Attorneys for Logan called the proposed remedy “vague and unworkable,” and attorneys for voting and civil rights groups argued that third-party data sets, including Lexis Nexis, couldn’t reliably establish citizenship.

The Limits of the Federal Claim

Essayli argued that the request was narrow and wouldn’t leave ballots uncounted. He described it as separating ballots from people suspected of being noncitizens until the state could prove their citizenship. He called the federal process for flagging voters unquestionable in its “reliability and credibility,” while also telling Carter, “We’re never going to stand here and tell you that everything is 100%.“

Essayli said some elections “are decided by a handful of votes” and argued that California shouldn’t count the ballots without doing more to verify voters’ citizenship. After the hearing, he said American voters were being “disenfranchised in real time” and said the administration would wait for Carter’s decision Wednesday, then likely appeal. He denied threatening state officials, despite Justice Department letters sent to election officials statewide the previous week warning of possible criminal penalties. State officials called those letters a legally baseless intimidation tactic.

The case sits within the administration’s broader effort to intervene in state-run elections, based on its claim that state elections lack adequate safeguards against noncitizen voting. Elections experts say such fraud occurs but is exceedingly rare. Carter previously rejected an administration lawsuit seeking California’s unredacted voter rolls as “unprecedented and illegal.” Federal judges also have blocked executive orders demanding nationwide voter ID and citizenship requirements, along with a plan for the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots. The administration says it is enforcing the law; the ballots, and the officials responsible for counting them, remain under pressure.