Justice Department Drops California Ballot Lawsuit After Court Defeats
The Trump administration has abandoned its legal effort to force California to set aside about 20,000 mail ballots it claimed may have been sent to non-citizens, dropping the lawsuit on Friday after losing at every level of the federal courts.
The Justice Department filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in federal court in Los Angeles on 6 November, conceding that “the relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available”. By the time of a hearing scheduled for 13 November, the department said, the disputed ballots would have been mixed in with lawful votes and could no longer be separated.
The move ends a case that had become a centrepiece of the administration’s effort to assert federal control over state-run elections — and it arrives days after the midterm elections in which Democrats won back the House.
Four defeats in eleven days
The department sued California and Los Angeles County in mid-October, asking a judge to order election officials to segregate mail ballots associated with people on a federal list of suspected non-citizens until their citizenship could be checked. Ballots had already been sent to all of the state’s 23 million registered voters by the time the case was filed, and hundreds of thousands had already been processed.
The courts rejected the request at every step. On 26 October, the Ninth Circuit dismissed the department’s emergency appeal. Two days later, US District Judge David O. Carter refused a temporary restraining order, warning that separating ballots so late in the process could disenfranchise eligible voters and confuse the count. The Ninth Circuit declined again on 30 October, and on 2 November — the day before the election — the Supreme Court denied the administration’s emergency application. The brief, unexplained order was referred to the full court by Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency applications from California.
Judge Carter had nevertheless scheduled a hearing for 13 November, with a special master due to examine the accuracy of the federal government’s list. The department’s dismissal notice said that exercise was now pointless: by then, California would have “irreparably commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones”.
Counting continues
California election officials had processed about nine million ballots by early Friday, with nearly five million still to be counted, according to state figures. Mail ballots postmarked by election day and received within seven days must still be processed. Counties must send state and federal contest returns to Sacramento by 4 December, with statewide certification scheduled for 11 December.
The dismissal does not establish that anyone on the disputed list voted illegally, nor does it resolve every federal challenge to California’s voter rolls. The Justice Department said it would continue pursuing suspected election-law violations through other cases, the Associated Press reported.
Bonta calls it an unlawful effort
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the administration had abandoned an “unlawful effort” after four consecutive court losses. He said the planned 13 November hearing would have tested the reliability of the government’s list, and noted that courts in other cases had raised questions about the accuracy of similar federal lists.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, had previously defended the lawsuit as an effort to protect the election before voting concluded. He had also acknowledged in court that the case would become irrelevant after election day, because there would be no way to separate the disputed ballots from the rest.
The department remains entangled in separate litigation brought by immigrant and voting-rights groups seeking to limit its use of the lists of suspected non-citizens.
A separate California fraud case
The dismissal is distinct from a federal case in which ten non-citizens were indicted in California over alleged voter fraud. That case, brought by federal prosecutors in a separate action, remains before the courts, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless proved guilty. California voters rejected a billionaire tax in a separate ballot measure decided in the same election.
