A federal judge on Tuesday expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s efforts to force California to void some 20,000 mail-in ballots that the federal government said were sent to noncitizens.
After listening to arguments for several hours in a packed Los Angeles courtroom, the judge, David O. Carter, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, did not issue an immediate ruling and said he would issue his decision Wednesday.
But he suggested he was not convinced by the Justice Department’s argument that urgent action was needed to stop illegal voting before next week’s election. California counties have until Dec. 3 to certify the election, he noted, giving the government ample time to review ballots and determine whether they were cast illegally.
The judge also questioned the means by which the administration assembled its list of potentially illegal voters and observed that the government’s requirements represented a “monumental change” in the state’s election procedures.
And he argued that federal prosecutors do not need to examine ballots themselves to determine whether an unauthorized voter cast an absentee ballot, since returned envelopes must be signed by the voter.
“You have a cure, for God’s sake,” the judge told Bill Essayli, Southern California’s top federal prosecutor. “Come out and blame yourself.”
Mr. Essayli told Judge Carter that he wanted to “just keep those ballots separate.”
“It’s not about overturning them. We just want to protect the government’s interests in judging this case,” Mr. Essayli said.
He said the Justice Department would likely appeal the judge’s upcoming decision.
The hearing was the Trump administration’s latest attempt to lend legal credibility to its claims that large numbers of noncitizens voted illegally in U.S. elections. Several studies have found this claim doubtful.
The administration has filed lawsuits to block counts in several states and moved to intervene in Alaska’s Senate race, in what critics see as a broader attempt to influence the results of the midterm elections. Recent polls have shown Democrats holding a wide advantage in many critical races.
Last week, another federal judge in California blocked the Department of Homeland Security from carrying out most of an operation that involved arresting and questioning people in nine states suspected of voting without the proper citizenship status.
State and local prosecutors told Judge Carter on Tuesday that federal prosecutors were ignoring accepted due process in challenging illegal voting and were “intimidating counties across California” to disrupt the state’s process for verifying eligibility and counting votes.
In July, they said, Homeland Security claimed in a letter to California’s secretary of state that more than 190,000 noncitizens could be listed as registered voters. This month, lawyers noted, that number fell to about 20,000, of whom only a few dozen were arrested. The methodology used by the government was “a recipe for disenfranchisement,” they added, because it was highly prone to errors and false positives.
Los Angeles County lawyers also argued that the litigation had a “chilling effect” on the election process. Justice Department officials, including Mr. Essayli, sent formal letters to California county election officials warning that they would face criminal prosecution if they knowingly processed or counted ballots cast by people the federal government claims are noncitizens.
Judge Carter, appointed by President Bill Clinton, reprimanded Mr. Essayli on Tuesday, saying “it would be wise for any threats against state and county employees to cease immediately.”
Outside court, Mr. Essayli denied making any threats.
“I understand we can still prosecute people after the election,” he said, “but our goal here is not to prosecute hundreds of thousands of people. It’s about safeguarding the integrity of the election. We want to stop illegal voting. We don’t want to prosecute it later.”
The California case involves a list of names that the Justice Department sent this month to voting officials in the heavily Democratic state. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles gave the Los Angeles County registrar 48 hours to verify the citizenship or separate the ballots of 20,000 people from a list of potential noncitizens that they said was compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.
California officials responded that the deadline was impossible to meet. The Justice Department then filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent ballots sent to these individuals from being counted.
Shortly afterward, federal authorities announced that they had arrested 28 immigrants statewide who they suspected of registering to vote or voting in California elections before becoming naturalized citizens. All had green cards and many denied having registered or knowingly voted. There are approximately 23 million registered voters in the state.
State and local officials in California and Los Angeles have questioned the reliability of federal data and said they cannot stop the processing of registered voters’ ballots based on unverified allegations.
In interviews, Los Angeles officials said many of the 20,000 names appeared to have been collected outside their jurisdiction.
After the case was assigned to Judge Carter, the Justice Department preemptively requested a hearing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the matter should be decided sooner than Judge Carter’s scheduled hearing on Tuesday.
The appeals panel on Sunday declined to preemptively decide the case and sent it back to the lower court.
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