On the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, President Donald Trump’s administration made a final attempt to throw out more than 20,000 mail-in ballots in California, claiming non-U.S. citizens were trying to vote.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ), led by Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, has claimed to have a list of non-US citizens on California’s voter rolls.
In mid-October, the federal government initially filed a lawsuit based on these allegations, which was dismissed by a California district court.
On Monday, the DoJ requested a “limited injunction” ordering the state of California to “stop mixing suspected illegal ballots with legal ballots” pending verification of voter status.
However, hours after the appeal was filed, the Supreme Court said it would refuse to stop California from counting votes.
When the first suit was filed by the Trump administration earlier in October, Los Angeles District Judge David Carter warned that singling out ballots would “wreak havoc” on the electoral process and harm voters’ confidence in the democratic process.
“If the Executive Branch can discard votes and threaten ongoing elections because of unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” Carter wrote in dismissing the initial complaint.
Early voting has been underway in California for several weeks, with hundreds of thousands of ballots already processed.
Analysis shows thousands of eligible voters blacklisted from ballots
The voter list was compiled by the US Department of Homeland Security. In its response to the federal government’s lawsuit, California defended the integrity of its elections and said the process the Trump administration used to identify non-citizen voters was likely flawed and full of errors.
Last week, another federal judge ordered the DoJ to share its list with an immigrant rights group and voting rights watchdog based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
A legal filing of the analysis found that thousands of U.S. citizens on the list appear to be inexplicably flagged as ineligible to vote. U.S. District Judge Carter said people recently reported as noncitizens on other states’ voter rolls have repeatedly turned out to be naturalized U.S. citizens.
Trump’s fixation on election fraud
Trump has made unfounded claims of election fraud for years, despite multiple investigations revealing that such malfeasance is extremely rare.
For the current midterm election cycle, Trump has focused on claiming that non-U.S. citizens are trying to vote, although these claims have been repeatedly refuted by research and surveys.
“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to compel a state and local government to abandon its own constitutional election procedures and submit to the will of the executive branch,” U.S. District Judge Carter wrote in October.
America’s most populous state, California, is heavily Democratic and is not expected to be a competitive state for Trump’s Republicans in the midterms.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is an outspoken critic of Trump and has warned the presidential administration against attempting to interfere in the state’s election process.
Ahead of Tuesday’s midterm vote, Newsom announced the deployment of election law experts, poll observers and a hotline for voters to report any attempts at intimidation or election interference.
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