The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency bid to force California election officials to set aside and not count ballots tied to a Justice Department list of alleged non-citizens. The justices gave no explanation, and there were no noted dissents.
The dispute centered on 20,000 ballots the Justice Department said were linked to non-citizens on California’s voter rolls. The agency delivered a USB drive to Los Angeles and Sacramento election officials in mid-October and gave them 48 hours to review the names. It also threatened to sue if the ballots were not sequestered until the listed people could verify their citizenship. California officials refused.
That refusal turned the matter into an emergency court fight that had already moved through the lower courts. A federal judge on Friday blocked the government from threatening California election officials who counted ballots from people on the list. Rob Bonta said the latest decision should end the administration’s effort to disrupt California’s elections through emergency court orders, while Gavin Newsom said the highest court in the land had firmly slapped down what he called a baseless attack on California’s electoral process.
The hard part for the Justice Department never changed: it never showed its work. Dean Logan said the agency had not provided the underlying evidence, source or methodology supporting its claim that the identified voters were ineligible. Without that foundation, the accusation was a number on a list, not proof that 20,000 ballots should be pulled from the count.
That gap matters because the case was built on urgency, not transparency. The administration had been publicizing arrests of dozens of non-citizens it said had registered and voted in federal elections, but the Supreme Court’s order leaves California’s ballots in place and does not answer the question at the center of the fight: what, exactly, did the Justice Department have when it sent over the names? Omar Muñoz put it more bluntly last month: “It was staged and I’m the patsy … They wanted to make a scene,”
