California Ballots Ruling: Federal Judge Blocks DOJ Demand to Segregate 20,000 Ballots in Noncitizen Voting Case

A federal judge in California has refused to let the Justice Department force election officials to pull aside the mail ballots of roughly 20,000 voters the government suspects may not be citizens, delivering a significant setback to the Trump administration’s aggressive late push to reshape how the nation’s largest state runs its election. In a 26-page order issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied the department’s emergency request for an order compelling California to segregate the ballots until each voter’s citizenship could be verified, ruling that the demand arrived far too late and threatened to disrupt a vote that is already well underway.

The decision, in the case of United States v. California, lands at the most sensitive possible moment. California mails a ballot to every one of its roughly 23 million registered voters, and more than 3.7 million of them have already cast ballots in the midterm elections. Election Day is Tuesday, and Carter concluded that ordering counties to invent an entirely new ballot-handling procedure in the final days of the campaign would risk disenfranchising eligible citizens, chill lawful participation, and likely violate federal law governing changes to voter registration close to an election.

The Justice Department moved immediately to challenge the ruling, appealing to the Ninth Circuit on the same day the order came down. The fight is now one of the most closely watched election-law battles in the country, pitting the administration’s claims of widespread noncitizen voting against a state’s constitutional authority to administer its own elections — with the outcome potentially decided only hours before polls close.

Inside the California Ballots Noncitizen Voting Ruling

Carter’s reasoning rested on timing, practicality and federalism. The request, he found, came too late in the process to be carried out without serious harm. Segregating the flagged ballots, he wrote, would wreak havoc and disrupt an election that is already underway, forcing county officials to build new procedures on the fly for identifying, isolating and later re-integrating tens of thousands of ballots scattered across the state’s enormous mail-voting operation.

The judge also concluded that the government’s demand likely runs into the National Voter Registration Act, the federal law that restricts systematic changes to voter registration lists within 90 days of a federal election. California was deep inside that protected window when the Justice Department filed suit on October 15 against Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan, the two officials named as defendants after they declined to comply with the department’s demands voluntarily.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Carter held that the federal statute criminalizing voting by noncitizens does not give federal officials the power to dictate how a state administers its elections. The government’s remedy for unlawful voting, the order reasoned, is the one Congress actually provided: investigating and prosecuting individuals who vote illegally. Carter wrote that never before has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state into abandoning the election procedures its own constitution and laws prescribe. The order did not accuse the administration of acting in bad faith, but it left little doubt that the court viewed the emergency request as an extraordinary intervention unsupported by the law the department cited.

How a List of 191,000 Names Shrank to 20,000

The dispute traces back to July, when the Department of Homeland Security told California officials it had identified 190,832 people on the state’s voter rolls who were potentially noncitizens. By October, that figure had been narrowed dramatically, to roughly 20,000 names, which federal officials delivered to Los Angeles County on a password-protected thumb drive with instructions to hold those voters’ ballots aside.

Exactly how the list was assembled became a central issue in the litigation. According to the court proceedings, the names were produced by matching purchased voter registration data against federal immigration records and commercial data held by LexisNexis. Carter pressed the government on the reliability of that method, questioning what error rates the matching process produced and why the original pool of suspected noncitizens collapsed from about 191,000 to about 20,000 without a clear explanation. A matching exercise that sweeps in large numbers of eligible voters by mistake, the court suggested, is a weak foundation for an emergency order affecting real ballots.

The Justice Department, for its part, argued that California officials failed to act on the information in time, alleging that the state missed a 48-hour review deadline after receiving the names. State and county officials dispute that characterization and have resisted the federal demands throughout, setting up the confrontation Carter resolved on Wednesday. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has defended the effort publicly, framing it as a straightforward attempt to ensure that only citizens vote in federal elections.

Why Segregating Ballots Mid-Election Posed a Logistical Problem

Even if the legal questions had broken the government’s way, the mechanics of compliance would have been daunting. Los Angeles County alone is the largest election jurisdiction in the United States, and testimony in the case established that more than 500,000 ballots statewide had already been processed to the stage where envelopes have been signature-verified and the ballots inside separated from them. Once a ballot is separated from its envelope, tracing it back to an individual voter is virtually impossible by design — the separation exists precisely to protect ballot secrecy.

That reality undercut the core of the government’s request. For hundreds of thousands of early voters, there is simply no physical way to retrieve a specific person’s ballot from the pool of processed votes. For ballots still in envelopes, counties would have had to screen every incoming envelope against the federal list, divert matches into a separate stream, and then adjudicate citizenship questions for each one — all while regular counting continued and statutory deadlines approached. Carter concluded that the burden and the risk of error fell overwhelmingly on lawful voters, including naturalized citizens whose records are the most likely to be mismatched in commercial and government databases.

The chilling effect concerned the court as well. If voters learn that appearing on an error-prone federal list can cause their ballot to be set aside days before an election, some eligible citizens — particularly immigrants who naturalized years ago — may choose not to vote at all rather than risk public scrutiny of their status. Election law has long treated that kind of deterrence as a serious harm, and it weighed heavily in the balance the court struck between election integrity and election access.

The Justice Department’s Case and the Appeal to the Ninth Circuit

The administration has paired its civil litigation with criminal enforcement. Under an initiative it calls Operation Protect the Vote, the Justice Department has charged 28 people in California with illegally registering or voting as noncitizens, and it has warned that officials who knowingly tabulate ballots cast by noncitizens could themselves face prosecution. Supporters of the effort argue that even a small number of unlawful votes can decide close races and that the federal government has both the right and the duty to act before ballots are counted rather than after.

Wednesday’s appeal was not the department’s first trip to the Ninth Circuit in this dispute. Earlier in the week, the government tried to leapfrog Carter and take its demand directly to the appeals court; on Monday, a three-judge panel ruled 2-to-1 against the department and sent the matter back to the district court, which produced Wednesday’s order. The fresh appeal now returns the same fight to the same court, on a drastically compressed calendar, with the government asking for emergency relief before Tuesday.

Critics of the administration’s approach, including California’s elected officials, counter that documented cases of noncitizen voting remain rare relative to the tens of millions of ballots cast, that states already verify citizenship at registration, and that the true purpose of the eleventh-hour litigation is to sow doubt about the results. Both sides agree on at least one thing: the precedent set here will shape how far the federal government can reach into state election administration for years to come.

What Happens Next in the California Ballots Fight

The immediate question is whether the Ninth Circuit intervenes before Election Day. Appellate judges are generally reluctant to alter election rules close to a vote — a principle the Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized — and Carter’s order leaned on many of the same concerns. Still, the government could seek further emergency review from the Supreme Court if the appeals court declines to act, and each passing day narrows what any court could realistically order counties to do.

Whatever the courts decide this week, the underlying dispute will outlast the midterms. The criminal cases against the 28 charged individuals will proceed on their own track, the data-matching methodology behind the federal list will face continued scrutiny, and Congress may revisit the balance between federal election oversight and state control. For now, California’s ballots — including those of the roughly 20,000 voters on the government’s list — will be counted under the state’s own procedures, and the burden of proving any individual voted unlawfully rests with prosecutors after the fact, exactly where Judge Carter said the law puts it.

Sources

USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from USA Today, Daily Journal and Times Now.