A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration two defeats in a single day on election-related cases, refusing to order California to set aside mail ballots linked to about 20,000 registered voters the government identified as likely noncitizens, and refusing to lift an injunction blocking Homeland Security election operations in nine states. The decisions, issued on Friday, October 30, 2026, came just four days before the November 3 midterm election, and they illustrate how courts handle last-minute requests to change how ballots are processed. Neither ruling decides the ultimate merits of the underlying disputes. Both turn, in large part, on timing, on the standard for emergency relief, and on the risk that a late intervention could disrupt counting or discourage eligible voters.
The California case began with a list. Federal agencies, including United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations, obtained California’s voter roll over the summer and compiled what they described as a high-confidence list of noncitizens. On October 12, the government gave that list to California and Los Angeles County and asked them to sequester, or set aside separately, the mail ballots of the people named, so that citizenship could be checked before those ballots were counted. The state and county refused, expressing doubt about the reliability of the list, and the Justice Department sued on October 15. A district judge denied a temporary restraining order on October 28, and the government then asked the Ninth Circuit for an emergency injunction pending appeal.
A divided Ninth Circuit panel denied that request by 2-1. Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez joined the unsigned majority opinion, while Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented. The majority said the government had not shown that the law clearly favoured its position, which is the demanding standard for a mandatory injunction that would require a state to take affirmative action. It held that nothing in 18 U.S.C. 611, the federal law that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, clearly preempts California’s comprehensive statutory scheme for challenging ballots and determining voter eligibility. In other words, the existence of a federal criminal prohibition on noncitizen voting does not, by itself, automatically displace the state’s own procedures for handling disputed registrations.
Why the Ninth Circuit rejected the California ballot request
The majority also relied on the Purcell principle, a doctrine drawn from Supreme Court practice that cautions federal courts against changing election rules close to an election. The reasoning is practical as well as legal: election officials, poll workers and voters rely on settled procedures, and a late change can create confusion, increase errors and undermine confidence, even if the change is well-intentioned. Here, the court noted a sworn statement from a Los Angeles County official warning that separating ballots at this stage would be disruptive, in part because hundreds of thousands of ballots had already been processed. Pulling individual ballots out of a commingled stream is not a simple administrative task once counting is under way, and the majority treated that disruption as a material consideration.
The reliability of the list was another central issue, although the majority’s opinion did not need to resolve every factual dispute to deny emergency relief. California and outside analysts who examined the list argued that a substantial share of the names did not match current voter files, or appeared to include people who had since become citizens or were otherwise eligible. One analysis cited in coverage of the case found that 42 percent of the names examined did not appear in the state’s current voter files. The government, by contrast, maintained that its matching process was rigorous and that counting ballots cast by noncitizens would violate federal law. The court did not declare the list accurate or inaccurate in a final sense; it held that the government had not met the high bar for emergency intervention, particularly where the majority saw a material risk of disenfranchising eligible voters if ballots were set aside on the basis of an unproven list.
Judge Bumatay’s dissent took a different view of that risk. He argued that refusing to segregate the disputed ballots could make it impossible, after the election, to separate lawful votes from unlawful ones if the government’s claims were later proved, and that this irreversibility itself justified emergency relief. That argument echoes a familiar tension in election litigation: one side warns that counting a disputed ballot cannot be undone, while the other warns that setting aside an eligible voter’s ballot cannot easily be undone either. The majority resolved that tension, for emergency purposes, in favour of leaving the state’s existing procedures in place, while the case continues on appeal. The underlying lawsuit is not over, and the government could still pursue its claims after the election, when the timing concerns that drove the Purcell analysis would look different.
Homeland Security election operations in nine states
The second Ninth Circuit decision on the same day concerned a broader set of election operations. A unanimous panel denied the Department of Homeland Security’s motion for a stay pending appeal of a preliminary injunction barring the department’s so-called Unlawful Voter Initiative election-related field operations in nine states through Election Day. The panel held that the government had not shown it would be irreparably harmed by the injunction, noting that it had waited until weeks before the election to begin what it described as a surge in enforcement activity. That delay, in the court’s view, undercut the claim that immediate relief was urgent, and it reinforced the concern that late federal field operations could chill or confuse election administration.
The same day also brought a separate district-court order that widened the picture. United States District Judge Trina Thompson, in the Northern District of California, temporarily restrained the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from threatening election officials with criminal prosecution for processing ballots cast by registered voters whose eligibility federal authorities had questioned. The order also barred demands that officials remove such voters from the rolls or segregate their ballots based solely on federal allegations. Thompson directed the administration to inform election officials who had received earlier demands that those demands were no longer enforceable under the temporary order. The restrictions were nationwide and were scheduled to remain in effect until November 16, while the court considered further proceedings.
That order, like the Ninth Circuit decisions, is temporary and does not finally resolve whether the federal government can investigate suspected noncitizen voting, or what evidence would be needed to sustain such an investigation. Federal law does prohibit noncitizen voting in federal elections, and no party in these cases has disputed that basic prohibition. The dispute is about process and proof: who decides eligibility, on what evidence, under what procedures, and how close to an election a federal agency can intervene to change those procedures. State officials argue that they already have systems to check eligibility, to challenge registrations and to refer suspected violations for prosecution, and that a federal list, however compiled, does not replace those systems. The administration argues that federal agencies have access to immigration databases that states do not, and that without federal intervention, unlawful votes could be counted and then become indistinguishable from lawful ones.
Washington lawsuit and the wider list dispute
The California dispute is not isolated. The Justice Department has sent letters to election officials in several states, including California, Washington, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada, saying it had identified noncitizens on their voter rolls. On the same day as the Ninth Circuit rulings, OneAmerica Votes, the Latino Community Fund of Washington State and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union sued President Donald Trump, the Justice Department, Homeland Security and federal prosecutors in Seattle. Their complaint challenges an October 26 letter in which two federal prosecutors gave Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs a list of roughly 400 registered voters that federal agencies believed were ineligible, and it alleges that the letter misstated Election Day as November 2 and warned that more names could follow. No government response to that complaint was on the public docket as of the weekend, and the allegations in the complaint have not been adjudicated.
That Washington case matters because it shows how the same federal approach plays out in different procedural postures. In California, the government sued the state and sought a court order compelling action. In Washington, advocacy groups sued the government, seeking to block what they characterise as pressure on state officials. In both settings, the factual dispute about list accuracy is likely to be central, and it is a dispute that turns on matching methodology: how names, dates of birth and other identifiers in state voter files are compared with federal immigration records, how naturalisation after registration is accounted for, and how errors are identified and corrected. Matching across large databases is notoriously error-prone, and courts have in past election cases treated a high error rate as a reason to be cautious about mass challenges, even where individual cases of ineligibility may be real.
For voters, the practical message of the October 30 decisions is narrower than the headlines might suggest. Eligible voters in California and the nine states covered by the Homeland Security injunction should not expect a last-minute change to how their ballots are processed as a result of these rulings, and election officials in those states have been told, in Thompson’s order, that earlier federal demands to segregate ballots or remove voters are not enforceable while that order remains in effect. That does not mean the disputes are finished. Appeals continue, the Thompson order is scheduled for further proceedings, and post-election litigation over close results remains possible, particularly in California, where counties finish counting in the weeks after Election Day and the state certifies results on December 11. Readers should therefore treat the Ninth Circuit’s decisions as a ruling about emergency relief before the election, not as a final judgment about noncitizen voting, list accuracy or federal authority.
USN has previously reported on federal election disputes, including concerns inside the FBI about election-day ballot orders (https://usnbreaking.com/inside-the-fbi-agents-worry-they-could-be-ordered-to-seize-ballots-on-election-day/), and the Justice Department statement that FBI and ICE staff will not serve as midterm poll monitors (https://usnbreaking.com/justice-department-says-fbi-and-ice-staff-will-not-serve-as-midterm-poll-monitors/), which provide context for how federal agencies are approaching the 2026 vote.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-justice-dept-breaks-with-tradition-intervene-midterms-2026-11-02/, The Digital Free Press: https://www.thedigitalfreepress.com/post/ninth-circuit-denies-doj-california-ballots-washington-groups-sue and Outlook India: https://www.outlookindia.com/amp/story/international/trump-noncitizen-voter-lists-us-midterm-elections-2026.