Supreme Court turns down Trump administration bid to block California ballots

The US Supreme Court on Monday, November 2, rejected an effort by President Donald Trump's administration to prevent California from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots. The decision came hours after the Justice Department sought an injunction on the eve of the US midterm elections, alleging that noncitizens were attempting to vote.

The department, led by Trump's former personal attorney Todd Blanche, said it had a list identifying non-US citizens registered to vote in California. Its request asked the court to require the state to keep ballots from voters it considered potentially ineligible separate from other ballots while their citizenship status was checked.

Federal officials initially sued over those allegations in mid-October, but a California district court rejected the case. In that ruling, Los Angeles District Judge David Carter warned that separating the ballots would disrupt election operations and damage public confidence in the democratic process. California had already been conducting early voting for several weeks, and hundreds of thousands of ballots had been processed.

California challenged the reliability of the list, which was compiled by the US Department of Homeland Security. Responding to the lawsuit, the state defended its election safeguards and argued that the administration's method for identifying possible noncitizen voters was likely to contain significant flaws and errors.

Last week, another federal judge directed the Justice Department to provide the list to an immigrant rights group and a voting rights watchdog based at the University of California Los Angeles. An analysis presented in a legal filing found that thousands of US citizens appeared to have been marked as ineligible without explanation. Carter also noted that people recently identified as noncitizens on voter rolls elsewhere had repeatedly proved to be naturalized Americans.

Trump has repeatedly made unsupported allegations of election fraud over several years, although multiple investigations have found it to be exceedingly rare. During this midterm campaign, he has focused on allegations of voting by noncitizens, claims that research and investigations have repeatedly debunked.

California, the country's most populous state, strongly favors Democrats and is not expected to be competitive for Republicans in these midterms. Governor Gavin Newsom, an outspoken Trump critic, has cautioned the administration against interfering with the state's voting process.

Before Tuesday's voting, Newsom announced that election law experts and poll observers would be deployed. He also announced a voter help line for reporting suspected intimidation or interference at polling places.