Judge refuses to stop California from counting alleged non-citizen voters’ ballots in DOJ lawsuit

A federal judge in California is denying a Trump administration request to separate 20,000 mail-in ballots from people he claims are noncitizens.

“This request violates long-standing constitutional principles that states must control their elections,” U.S. District Judge David Carter wrote. “If plaintiff’s request for last-minute relief is granted, either party could create chaos for its own political purposes and disrupt the electoral process.”

Carter, as he did during Tuesday’s hearing, notes that there is a “clear remedy” available to the federal government: the use of its prosecutorial tools. Carter also notes that California has established procedures to cancel the voter registration of anyone proven ineligible.

“The relief requested by the Executive Branch, however, would wreak havoc and disrupt elections already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters, and reduce the votes of American citizens,” Carter wrote.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Oct. 15, seeking a court order that the state “scind the absentee ballots of federally identified individuals who may be noncitizens” and not count them until their citizenship is confirmed.

The ministry said it had compiled “a list of more than 20,000 names of people” who the government said “are likely non-citizens.”

State attorneys have countered that the government’s numbers are unreliable. In a July letter, he estimated the number of suspect voters at 190,000 and refused to release information about how he compiled his lists.

“Where is the evidence?” An attorney representing California, Christina McCall, said as much during a hearing Tuesday, calling the government’s allegations “vague” and “unreliable.”

Another attorney for the state, Anne Bellows, told the judge that “the stakes here are enormous,” arguing that the government was trying to force California into opening an unclear investigation into the citizenship of tens of thousands of people without any clear standards shortly before the election.

It’s “a recipe for disenfranchisement,” Bellows said.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli told the judge, “We’re not telling California what they should do. We’re telling them what they can’t do.”

Essayli said that once the state becomes aware of potential noncitizens on its voter rolls, “it will have to do something.”

“What they can’t do is do nothing and proceed to count the votes,” he said.

The judge said if the government believes there is non-citizen voting, which constitutes a crime, it should file charges.

“Don’t you have the power to indict?” » Carter asked Essayli. “You have filed 28 indictments,” he said, referring to a recent announcement from prosecutors regarding individuals who voted illegally in California in recent years. “You can find others. You have the right to bring this indictment against them.”

“You have a cure, for God’s sake,” Carter said. “Come out and blame yourself.”

The Justice Department has already gone to a federal appeals court once over the matter. He filed a motion to expedite the case with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week, after Carter failed to act on his request to rule on the case by Thursday.

The appeals court held an emergency hearing on Sunday and ruled against the administration with a 2-1 verdict the next day.

The majority held that it lacked jurisdiction because Carter had not yet ruled, but held that the government’s “claimed emergency” was at least in part “a self-constructed emergency.”

“At least part of the delay is attributable to the United States’ delay in filing a lawsuit,” Judge Mark Bennett wrote in the ruling.

“The United States has been challenging California’s voter rolls since at least July 16, when it sent a letter to the California Secretary of State citing its ‘(p)preliminary’ analysis of California’s voter rolls. And neither California’s law allowing ballots to be processed twenty-nine days before an election, nor its law providing for the issuance of absentee ballots to registered voters, is new.”

Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez wrote in a concurring opinion that the government was asking the “court to dictate to a state legislature a matter that falls squarely within the traditional domain of the state, upending state policies in this regard and inviting disorder and confusion for both voters and election officials.”

The dissenting judge, Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, wrote: “We should have granted relief to the federal government – ​​federal law prohibits California from mixing ballots likely cast by foreigners with legitimate ballots because it encourages and induces illegal voting. »