Justice Department Seeks Power Over California Ballots

The Justice Department asked a federal court to make Los Angeles County set aside ballots it questioned while California officials were already processing votes. The request put federal power over local election administration—and the ballots of ordinary voters—at the center of a dispute now before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Who Gets to Control the Count

California had been voting since early October, with residents mailing ballots, using collection sites and voting in person. Los Angeles had opened about 600,000 mail-in ballots by late Friday, and counties posted daily totals of ballots received online.

The federal government sought a temporary restraining order requiring Los Angeles County to set aside ballots it said might have been sent to noncitizens. After the judge assigned to the case scheduled a ruling for early the following week, federal lawyers sought a decision by Saturday afternoon. When no ruling came by then, they appealed to the 9th Circuit, arguing that the delay amounted to a denial of their request.

The appeals panel questioned both the federal government’s request and whether it had jurisdiction. California Deputy Solicitor Gen. Samuel P. Siegel called the claim that ballot processing had only just come to the government’s attention “absurd on its face.”

Federal lawyers argued that ballots couldn’t be “uncounted” once counted. They also said officials needed to identify ballots before separating them from their envelopes because voting is anonymous. The column said the government hadn’t explained why it needed to know how a person voted to check whether that person was eligible.

The Justice Department’s list of people it believed were illegally registered to vote had fallen from 190,000 to 20,000, according to the article. The list had been described as error-ridden and might have been compiled with help from an unidentified non-government “third party.” Federal prosecutors indicted 28 Californians during the investigation, and the article said some cases might not hold up.

Lists, Courts and the Machinery of Elections

The column said California had systems to identify problematic ballots and criminally prosecute unlawful voting. It also quoted the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States.”

The case had been reassigned from a Trump-appointed judge to David O. Carter, appointed by Bill Clinton, because of Carter’s experience in the subject matter. The federal government was also involved in a separate voting lawsuit in Washington, D.C. Plaintiffs led by the UCLA Voting Rights Project sought to stop the government from creating national voter lists using information they called unreliable and gathered through secretive means. The column said a ruling in that case could come within days.

In Maryland, former President Barack Obama urged voters in an advertisement released Monday to approve a constitutional amendment. The measure would remove a provision that prevented Democrats from drawing a potential 8-0 congressional map in 2022, allowing state Democrats to draw a new map for the next election cycle. The appeal to voters is about who gets to draw the lines inside the same congressional system.

Campaign Signs and Voter Power

In Texas’ 34th Congressional District, Republican candidate Eric Flores appeared on red campaign signs reading “Infantry Officer. Prosecutor. Father.” Other signs showed him with President Trump and said “Trump Endorsed” and “Support ICE!” Northern Cameron County Democrats paid for the signs. The Rio Grande Valley population is more than 90% Hispanic.

The Atlantic article, “The 'Big-Ass Truck' Vote,” by Nick Miroff, with photographs by Brian Finke, was published Oct. 26, 2026. It described shifting Latino voter preferences: Trump and Joe Biden roughly split Latino voters nationally in 2024, after several cycles in which Democratic presidential candidates won the group by double digits. Texas exit polls estimated Trump won Hispanic voters there by 10 percentage points.

That support appeared to have declined. Nearly one-fifth of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 said they didn’t want Republicans to control Congress, according to a poll earlier that month. A late-summer survey of Hispanic Texans likely to vote showed Democrats with a 2-to-1 advantage. The article describes voters, campaign messaging and ballot choices; it reports no mutual-aid effort or community-organized alternative to the election process.