A federal appeals court on Friday, October 30, 2026, again refused to order California to set aside more than 20,000 mail-in ballots that the Justice Department alleges are linked to people who may not be United States citizens. The decision, four days before the November 3 midterm elections, keeps those ballots in the ordinary counting process for now, and it marks the second time in less than a week that the Ninth Circuit has declined to grant the administration emergency relief in the case.
The ruling does not end the dispute. It is an interim decision on an emergency request, not a final judgment on whether any individual voter was eligible, whether the federal government’s list is accurate, or whether California’s procedures comply with federal law. What it does decide, for the moment, is that California will not be forced to pull disputed ballots out of the count while the underlying lawsuit continues. That distinction matters, because the case is still moving through the courts, and the administration could seek further review.
The same week also brought a parallel escalation outside the courtroom. Federal grand-jury subpoenas have reached election officials in California and Alaska, in criminal investigations that officials and critics describe very differently. The Justice Department presents those inquiries as normal, time-sensitive law enforcement work intended to protect lawful votes. Critics, including state officials, voting-rights groups and the campaigns under scrutiny, describe them as pressure on election administrators in the final days of a campaign. The subpoenas, like the ballot lawsuit, rest on allegations that remain contested and, in key respects, unproven in court.
What the California mail ballots ruling actually decided
The case is United States v. California. The Justice Department sued California on October 15, after state and Los Angeles County officials declined a federal demand to identify and set aside ballots associated with a list of about 20,000 people the government describes as likely noncitizens. The department asked the courts to require California to segregate those ballots and withhold them from counting until each voter’s citizenship could be verified.
On October 28, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, denied the department’s request for a temporary restraining order. Carter found that the government had not shown credible evidence to justify disrupting an election already under way, that its demands threatened to disenfranchise eligible voters, and that they improperly intruded on state authority over elections. He wrote that never before in American history had the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon its own constitutional election procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch.
The Justice Department immediately appealed. On October 30, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an unsigned 2-1 order, denied the department’s emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal. Judges Mark J. Bennett, an appointee of President Donald Trump, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, formed the majority. Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.
The majority’s reasoning turned heavily on feasibility and on the Constitution’s allocation of election authority. The panel wrote that, as the district court had found and with no clear error discerned, there was no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system. It also declined what it described as an invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text, writing that because Congress had not exercised its specific power to override California’s established laws for challenging ballots or removing ineligible voters, the state legislature’s statutory scheme remained the only method to do so.
The majority added a further warning about the ultimate consequence of the government’s request. It was not merely ballot segregation, the panel wrote, but ultimately both the cancellation of the ballot and the removal of voters from the voting rolls. That framing goes to the heart of California’s objection: a temporary hold, in practice, could become a permanent loss of a lawful vote if verification could not be completed in time or if the underlying list proved unreliable.
The dissent took a different view. Bumatay described the administration’s request as reasonable, warned that California has a lax system for ensuring voters are citizens, and argued that ballots cannot be segregated later if fraudulent votes are found once they have been mixed into the count. That argument captures the government’s central practical claim: once a mail ballot is opened and counted, it cannot be retrieved, so waiting until after the election may be too late.
This was not the panel’s first encounter with the case. Earlier in the same week, the Ninth Circuit had rejected an earlier emergency appeal as premature, while casting doubt on the validity of the administration’s case, because the district court had not yet ruled. The October 30 order therefore represents the second refusal in a week, but on a different procedural footing: this time the district court had ruled, and the appeals court reviewed that ruling and declined to reverse it on an emergency basis.
Why the 20,000 figure is an allegation, not a finding
Throughout this dispute, the figure of 20,000 has been repeated so often that it can sound like an established fact. It is not. It is the Justice Department’s claim, based on a list compiled by federal agencies, and it has not been accepted by the courts as proof that 20,000 noncitizens are registered or have voted in California.
California officials have described the list as highly unreliable. They point to a history that, in their telling, undermines confidence in the federal matching process. Federal officials initially identified a far larger number of suspected noncitizens on California’s rolls, nearly 191,000 according to the district court’s account, before narrowing the figure to about 20,000, without, in Carter’s view, adequately explaining the methodology or providing error rates. State and county officials told the court that the narrowed list still contained duplicates, people who had never registered, and false identity matches.
A sample review by Los Angeles County added a concrete illustration. County officials examined 200 people from the list to test its reliability. Of those for whom birthplace was meaningfully reported, 38.9 percent indicated they were born in the United States, which county officials said is strong evidence of citizenship. The state also told the court that about one in four voters on the broader list were born in the United States. Those figures do not prove that every person on the list is a citizen, and the review was preliminary, but they do show why a court would hesitate to treat the list as a reliable basis for withholding ballots.
The Justice Department has acknowledged that the list may contain errors. Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter said at a news conference that there may be some names on the list who turn out ultimately to be citizens, adding that the government was not perfect. The department maintains, however, that the risk of unlawful votes being counted justifies a precautionary hold, and that California cannot facilitate a violation of federal law by counting ballots it has been warned may be unlawful.
Two limits on the allegation deserve emphasis. First, the noncitizen status of the 20,000-plus people on the list is alleged only; it has not been established by a court finding. Second, the Justice Department has not disclosed how many of the listed people, if any, actually cast a ballot in this election, as opposed to merely appearing on a voter list. A list of registrants is not, without more, evidence of votes cast.
Reporting by The New York Times and other outlets has described the broader federal claims about noncitizen voters as unsubstantiated, noting that earlier, larger lists shrank dramatically after state review and produced only a handful of arrests relative to the numbers initially claimed. That characterization is itself contested by the administration, which says its process is a commonsense step to secure elections and that a subset of registrants has gone through manual verification. For readers, the safest way to understand the dispute is to keep the categories separate: the administration alleges that listed people may be noncitizens; California alleges the list is unreliable; no court has yet found, after a full trial, that the 20,000 people in question are noncitizens or that their ballots are unlawful.
There is also a separate, practical dispute about timing. California is a universal vote-by-mail state, meaning all active registered voters are sent a ballot. By the time the lawsuit was filed on October 15, ballots had already been mailed, and by the time Carter ruled, Los Angeles County had processed more than 331,000 mail ballots. County officials said their system has no function for setting aside the ballots of designated voters once processing has begun. Carter cited the Supreme Court’s caution against late changes to election rules, noting that the election was not merely upcoming but had already started, and that the requested remedy would likely violate federal voting laws, including a prohibition on systematic voter removals within 90 days of a federal election.
Judge Carter’s warning to stop threats against election workers
Running through Carter’s order is a second theme that has outlasted the ballot question itself: the language used toward election workers. The judge noted that on October 23, the department sent letters to every county in California requiring them to set aside the votes of alleged noncitizens, warning that officials risked significant federal scrutiny if they failed to comply. He noted that the government reiterated that threat in open court, saying state and county officials who did not comply risked federal charges for aiding and abetting an offense.
At a hearing on October 27, Carter warned that it would be wise for any threats to state and county election employees to cease immediately. In his written order the next day, he reiterated that such threats should cease. He concluded that the government could prosecute individuals suspected of voting illegally, as it has historically done, but could not substitute its preferred election procedures for those enacted by Congress and California, and he warned that the requested relief would wreak havoc, disrupt an election already under way, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.
That warning has since been echoed in other courtrooms. In Washington, D.C., Chief Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the administration to disclose the states where it had pressed officials to remove, withhold or set aside ballots, and directed that the 20,000-name California list be shared with an immigrant-rights group so it could help inform voters who feared they might be on the list.
Late on October 30, a separate interim order went further. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson of the Northern District of California granted a temporary restraining order in a case brought by the Service Employees International Union and other labor and civil-rights groups against the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. While it is in effect, the order bars those agencies from threatening state and local election officials and workers with criminal prosecution for refusing voter-specific demands, and from demanding that officials remove specific voters, refuse them ballots, or segregate ballots solely because the administration alleges those voters are ineligible. It also requires the agencies to notify officials who received such warnings that the demands and threats have been enjoined, and to inform the court about related demands to access election materials and ballots. The order is interim, not final: it expires on November 16, 2026, with a hearing on a longer preliminary injunction set for November 13, 2026, and it remains subject to challenge by the government.
The Justice Department’s response to Carter’s criticism has been to appeal, not to withdraw the underlying claim. Department lawyers argue that the federal ban on noncitizen voting gives the government a legitimate interest in preventing unlawful ballots from being counted, and that a segregated hold is a modest, temporary precaution, not a permanent disenfranchisement. California’s response is that the precaution is neither modest nor temporary when the list is unreliable, the election is already under way, and the ballots cannot, as a practical matter, be separated after the fact.
DOJ subpoenas widen: California election workers and Alaska
While the civil ballot lawsuit moved through the courts, a criminal track was moving in parallel. A federal grand jury in Santa Ana issued subpoenas to election officials in Los Angeles County at federal prosecutors’ urging, according to copies obtained through records requests and first reported by The New York Times. Two subpoenas to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office were issued on October 21, and a third followed on October 24. An accompanying Justice Department letter said the subpoenas were issued in connection with an official criminal investigation conducted by Homeland Security Investigations.
The subpoenas demanded a wide range of material, including how officials responded to warnings that the administration had identified 20,000 suspected noncitizen voters, how they screen for unlawful voting, and any records suggesting someone had aided or abetted an alien voting in a federal election. Los Angeles County officials were required to provide the information by November 4, the day after Election Day. The county registrar, Dean Logan, said threats and intimidation have no place in elections, a comment that reflects the county’s public stance that its staff should be able to administer the vote without fear of criminal inquiry for following state law.
Subpoenas were also issued more broadly in California. According to a person familiar with the matter cited by The Associated Press, subpoenas were being issued by all four U.S. attorneys in California, and copies obtained by that outlet showed two subpoenas sent to employees of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office requiring them to appear in court on November 4. A grand-jury subpoena is an intermediate investigative step, not a charge, and it does not, by itself, prove wrongdoing by the recipient. It does, however, signal that prosecutors are gathering evidence under criminal authority, which is why election officials and their lawyers treat it differently from a civil lawsuit or an administrative letter.
The special-master step added another layer. Less than 24 hours after Carter rejected the department’s demand to sequester ballots, the judge appointed a special master to evaluate the administration’s claims about the state’s voter rolls, with an expedited hearing set for November 13 on the list’s reliability. That appointment keeps the factual dispute alive after Election Day: even as ballots are counted and results are certified, the court will examine whether the federal list was sound. California must certify its results by December 11, according to court reporting, which leaves a window for that review before certification is final, but after voters have already cast their ballots.
USN has previously examined the wider debate over federal law-enforcement involvement in elections, including reporting on FBI agents’ worry they could be ordered to seize ballots on Election Day. That reporting concerned a different scenario from a grand-jury subpoena, but it illustrates why election officials are sensitive to any signal that criminal process could be used to intervene in counting. The department’s position is that investigating alleged unlawful voting is a core law-enforcement function, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore evidence of ineligible voting simply because an election is near.
Alaska: the second Sullivan and a Senate race in dispute
In Alaska, the dispute centers on a different kind of ballot question, but with a similar pattern: a federal intervention, days before an election, in a race that could affect control of the Senate. The incumbent is Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. The Democratic challenger is former Representative Mary Peltola. A third candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher from Petersburg, is also on the ballot, and his similar name is at the center of the controversy.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit the previous week seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate results if Senator Sullivan loses and the votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan would have been enough to change the outcome. On October 30, the department asked a judge to order state officials to preserve and segregate all ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan, for the purpose of investigating whether such rankings were the product of voter confusion, should such an investigation become necessary. Alaska’s Republican-led elections office has pressed a court to dismiss the case quickly, arguing that the lawsuit seeks to sow doubt and will cast a cloud over the contest. Because Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, it could be weeks before a winner is declared in any event.
The criminal investigation in Alaska accelerated sharply after a New York Times report published on October 28 described an alleged coordinated effort linked to Peltola’s campaign. According to that report, Peltola’s former campaign manager and other sources said campaign aides were instructed to search for people named Dan Sullivan who could enter the Senate race as part of an effort to confuse voters intending to vote for the incumbent senator. The Times report said Peltola herself was not directly involved in recruitment but was, according to one former aide, definitely aware of it. Those are allegations reported by the Times and cited by the department, not findings by a court, and they remain disputed.
Federal prosecutors issued more than 40 grand-jury subpoenas and record-preservation notices to key targets by the evening of October 29, according to officials familiar with the matter cited by CNN, with additional subpoenas expected. Alaska’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, told reporters in Anchorage that the investigation had been ongoing for several months, but that the Times report had resulted in a significant surge of law-enforcement assets to Alaska. The department’s amended complaint in the civil case, filed on October 29, draws on the Times account and alleges that Peltola’s team reportedly worked with people trying to recruit another candidate named Dan Sullivan to confuse voters, calling his place on the ballot the result of a conspiracy whose sole purpose was to draw votes from the incumbent.
Peltola has denied the allegation in clear terms. At a rally in Juneau on October 29, she said she knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except herself and the incumbent, adding, “I am not interested in tricking voters.” She later said she was deeply offended by accusations of involvement in anyone else’s candidacy, and that she did not need help beyond the support of voters. Her campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in a filing on October 29, called the accusation nonsense, arguing that only Daniel J. Sullivan himself could know his true reasons for filing as a candidate. Daniel J. Sullivan has himself said he entered the race on his own and told The Associated Press in June that he had no contact with Peltola’s campaign.
There is also a prior state history that complicates any simple narrative. Earlier in the year, Alaska’s Division of Elections found that Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy was meant to confuse voters, but state courts reversed that disqualification, and the Alaska Supreme Court ultimately ruled he was qualified to run. On the ballot, voters see Dan S. Sullivan identified as a registered Republican and incumbent, a distinction state officials say helps voters tell the candidates apart. State officials have also noted examples of well-informed voters who still mistakenly marked a ballot for the wrong Sullivan and had to seek a replacement, which shows that confusion is possible even without any alleged scheme. No court has ruled that the effort, if it occurred, broke any law, and the department’s civil request is, for now, limited to preserving and segregating ballots for a possible future investigation.
President Donald Trump has called for Peltola to drop out and face criminal prosecution, and Attorney General Todd Blanche, while declining to discuss criminal investigations in detail, has accused Democrats of cheating in public comments. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has also ordered a state investigation, saying the reporting reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections. Those political statements are part of the public record, but they are not court findings, and they have been met with denials from Peltola, her campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
What remains interim, and what to watch after November 3
The most important caveat for readers is that almost everything decided on October 30 is interim. The Ninth Circuit denied an emergency injunction pending appeal; it did not decide the full merits of United States v. California. Carter’s order denied a temporary restraining order; it did not hold a trial. The Alaska segregation request is, by the department’s own framing, for preservation and a possible future investigation, not a final determination that votes were confused or that a crime occurred. The grand-jury subpoenas in California and Alaska are investigative tools, not indictments.
After Election Day, several tracks will converge. In California, the special master’s review of the voter list is set for an expedited hearing on November 13, and certification is due by December 11. In Washington, the broader lawsuit over pressure on election officials is expected to produce a ruling by November 2, the eve of the election, but its broader merits may continue beyond that date. In Alaska, the ranked-choice count, the civil lawsuit over certification, and the criminal investigation will unfold on separate timelines, and it could be weeks before a Senate winner is known.
The administration could also seek further emergency relief from the full Ninth Circuit or from the Supreme Court, arguing that the panel’s feasibility finding was wrong and that the risk of unlawful votes being counted outweighs the disruption of segregation. California could argue, in response, that the list’s demonstrated errors, the impossibility of segregating ballots already processed, and the constitutional allocation of election authority to the states make any such order inappropriate. Both sides have now preserved those arguments for higher courts.
For voters in California, the immediate practical message is unchanged: ballots already cast remain in the count under the October 30 order, and no voter has been removed from the rolls by that order. For voters in Alaska, the immediate message is that the Senate race will be counted under ranked-choice rules, with an additional federal request to preserve ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan pending before a judge. For election workers in both states, the message is more uncertain: they are being asked to administer an election while also responding to subpoenas, preserving records, and watching courts weigh whether the federal government’s demands were lawful.
USN will continue to follow the California and Alaska cases, the special-master review, and any further court orders on subpoenas and ballot segregation, and will update this story as final rulings, rather than interim emergency orders, are issued. For the separate nationwide October 29 ballot-records letters, see USN’s companion report on the Justice Department’s warning to election officials.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, Al Jazeera and CNN.