The Trump Justice Department filed a Hail Mary petition with the Supreme Court on Monday that asked the justices to block California from counting 20,000 ballots the feds say were mailed to people who might be noncitizens ineligible to vote.
DOJ was shut out in lower courts and the request to the justices was a long shot, given the arrival of Election Day on Tuesday.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said all he’s looking for right now is an order directing California to segregate any ballots returned by the voters the feds say are noncitizens. That would prevent them from being counted while the legal issues — and, potentially, the voters’ citizenship — are fought out.
People were interested in these podcasts
“Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” Mr. Sauer wrote in his petition.
California runs an all-mail election, which means every one of the 27 million registered voters was supposed to get a ballot in the mail.
The Trump team says it identified 20,000 of them whom it believes to be noncitizens. It asked the state not to count those ballots until it verifies their citizenship.
A district judge, and then the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, have already rejected the idea of segregating the ballots.
They ruled that segregation is probably impossible at this point, particularly with so many ballots already returned.
And they said it’s California’s prerogative to run its election as it sees fit, even if that means not doing any checks to verify voters’ self-attestation that they are citizens.
Everything about the case is chaotic.
The Justice Department only alerted California to the potential noncitizens in mid-October, after ballots had been mailed.
DOJ then asked for immediate rulings, saying time was crucial. The lower courts said that time crunch was of DOJ’s own making.
The process used to identify the 20,000 names has also come under fire.
Homeland Security said it ran California’s list of voters through third-party databases to try to match names to Social Security numbers and other identifiers. It then ran those records through DHS data to try to spot people who had immigration files but had not yet achieved citizenship.
U.S. District Judge David Carter said he had too many questions about that process, including how the third-party data was used.
Judge Carter also pointed to DHS’ attempts to identify noncitizens in other states have fallen flat. It claimed nearly 16,000 names were on Nevada’s rolls but later reduced that to 185 after a manual review. And Nevada later confirmed all 185 were actually citizens, the judge said.
“Given the vagueness of plaintiff’s descriptions of its procedures and the unreliability of its similar claims in other states, the court cannot conclude that plaintiff’s process is credible,” Judge Carter ruled.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.