The Supreme Court on Monday denied the Justice Department's emergency request to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots the administration claims were cast by non-citizens, effectively ending a monthlong legal fight on the eve of Tuesday's midterm elections. The order was brief: "The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied."
Two lower courts had already rejected the department's bid. A federal district judge ruled against it last week, and a 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that decision days later. California has roughly 23 million registered voters, and election officials said more than 6 million mail ballots had already been received by Sunday night.
The dispute began last month when the Justice Department sent letters to California's Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Registrar demanding the disputed ballots be set aside. About a week later, armed Department of Homeland Security officials delivered letters to county election officials and employees threatening criminal charges if they did not comply, according to court filings. The department's brief argued that counting the ballots could "debase or dilute valid votes."
California election officials countered that the department's list of supposed non-citizen voters was "riddled with inaccuracies," and that processed ballots cannot be traced back to individual voters, making it impossible to segregate them without unraveling the broader count. U.S. District Judge David Carter, in a scathing ruling last week, wrote that the Justice Department's move showed an "ongoing pattern of attempted election interference," adding that "never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch."
The 9th Circuit's majority agreed, writing that "there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system." Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented, writing that California's unwillingness to separate the ballots encourages the "violation of federal law."
The ruling lands as part of a broader pattern: Trump has repeatedly alleged widespread non-citizen voting without producing court-tested evidence, and this case marks one of the most direct legal setbacks to that campaign. With the California Secretary of State's count now proceeding unimpeded, attention turns to how quickly results arrive once polls close Tuesday night, and whether the fight over ballot eligibility resurfaces in future election cycles.
