A federal judge in California has refused to stop the state counting the ballots of more than 20,000 voters the Justice Department says may not be citizens. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled on Wednesday, in a 26-page order after a three-and-a-half-hour hearing the day before, that the department is not entitled to the emergency order it demanded, which would have forced California and Los Angeles County to set those ballots aside uncounted while its lawsuit proceeds. The ballots keep being processed and counted, and the fight now moves up to the appeals court.
Judge Carter held the government likely has no right to bring the demand at all: the United States "likely lacks standing, and even if it did not, it likely has no cause of action." The federal ban on noncitizen voting, he found, gives the department no power to override how a state processes ballots — prosecuting individual noncitizens who vote is the remedy Congress provided. The remedy sought would itself likely break federal voting law, including the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day deadline for removing ineligible voters, and courts should not change election rules on the eve of a vote. He refused to trust the federal list — its procedures too vague, its similar claims elsewhere too unreliable — noting Nevada's figures fell from 15,903 names to 185 confirmed citizens. The emergency was of the department's own making, "solely due to its own neglect," and its letters threatening county officials "must stop": "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." California and its people, he added, are sovereign too. The lawsuit continues: a second hearing follows within two weeks, with expert testimony and a special master, ahead of the December 3 certification deadline.
The Justice Department answered within hours: notice of appeal filed Wednesday evening, an immediate appeal authorised by the Solicitor General, and an emergency order to be sought from the 9th Circuit. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who argued the case himself, stated the department's position in full: "The district court denied our emergency request to sequester ballots from 20,000 suspected noncitizens. Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials. This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution. The Solicitor General authorized an immediate appeal. We filed our Notice of Appeal and will immediately seek an emergency order from the Ninth Circuit." The appeals court has not yet said when it will act.
California's leaders welcomed the ruling. Attorney General Rob Bonta said: "Today's ruling is yet another important victory for the rule of law and the right to vote. But this fight is not over. We will keep fighting to protect California's elections from unlawful federal interference and get this baseless lawsuit dismissed." Governor Gavin Newsom said the legal system was "standing up to the President's authoritarian attempts to remain in power unchecked and unchallenged." Secretary of State Shirley Weber and County Registrar Dean Logan, who run the count, said segregation now would be logistically impossible and would push the count past the December 3 deadline; Logan said the ruling "reinforces what we have maintained throughout this process: election integrity and the protection of eligible voters go hand in hand."
Underneath the case is the department's list of more than 20,000 registered voters it calls "likely noncitizens," built from federal immigration records and Social Security data — Homeland Security said in July the figure could reach 190,000 statewide. On October 13 the department sent Secretary Weber a letter and a password-protected thumb drive of names, demanding segregation of any ballot whose voter could not be confirmed a citizen within 48 hours; she refused, voting was already underway, and it sued on October 15 — conceding in its own lawsuit that it is "not practicable or feasible" to dig deeper into the thousands of names before the election concludes. The 20,000 are, in the department's words, "just the floor," and all 28 people charged in California are on the list. Against that, Los Angeles County's check of a sample of 200 names found many appear to be citizens, and the Attorney General's office says more than half were canceled or inactive registrations.
President Trump has put his own name to the push. On October 16 he shared the department's warning letter to California and county officials on Truth Social with his own comment: "They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!" His stated position, quoted in a House Judiciary Democrats letter this month, is that "elections can never be honest with mail in ballots/voting," and in his July primetime address he spoke of hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people on the voter rolls and "tens of millions of ballots flowing aimlessly through the mail." His administration's court argument is the same case in courtroom form: a ballot cast by someone not entitled to vote dilutes a citizen's vote.
For ordinary voters, the ruling means no Californian's ballot will be pulled from the count mid-election on the strength of a list the court found not credible, election workers will not have to choose between counting votes and risking prosecution, and the count — more than 3.7 million ballots already cast — goes forward under the rules it started under. For citizens who want only eligible votes counted, the department's road stays open: prosecute any noncitizen it can prove voted, put its evidence before the special master at the next hearing, and ask the 9th Circuit for the emergency order promised. For now the ruling settles who decides — the states and Congress the Constitution puts in charge of elections — and the appeals court will have the next word.
— Previously posted on Sunday, October 26, 2026 —
The fight over the Justice Department's ballot-segregation order moved into a federal appeals court on Sunday, in a rare weekend hearing held over Zoom. A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel took up California's challenge to the order covering some 20,000 mail ballots cast by voters the federal government lists as likely noncitizens — and the first question the panel pressed was whether a federal court has jurisdiction over the dispute at all.
Two of the judges questioned both the court's reach and the reliability of the list behind the order, while the third was more sympathetic to the government's position. The panel gave no ruling from the bench. The case now heads to a trial-level hearing on Tuesday, with the clock running: Los Angeles County alone has already processed about 331,000 mail ballots, and counties across the state are working under the 48-hour demand the Justice Department letters imposed.
— Previously posted on Saturday, October 24, 2026 —
The Justice Department's letters to California's county registrars are out. Dated Friday, October 23, and obtained by news organizations, the letters give each registrar 48 hours to commit to working with the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to identify who on the county's own list "is a citizen and who is not" — and, for every voter whose citizenship cannot be confirmed, to "segregate — not cancel — those individuals' vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined." The letters cite the federal law against noncitizen voting, 18 U.S.C. § 611, and warn of legal jeopardy for officials who knowingly process such ballots. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli put it plainly on Saturday: "Knowingly processing noncitizen ballots is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. §§ 611 and 2."
The lists are county by county. The Justice Department says it identified 1,754 suspected noncitizens registered in Orange County, 1,355 in Riverside County, 1,133 in San Bernardino County, 902 in Santa Clara County, 407 in Contra Costa County, 334 in Ventura County, 180 in Santa Barbara County, 177 in Merced County, 81 in Santa Cruz County and 63 in San Luis Obispo County. Statewide, the department puts the number of "likely noncitizens" sent mail ballots at more than 20,000, says the names were manually verified against immigration files, and describes 20,000 as a floor that can rise. California officials dispute the list's reliability: an earlier federal flag of about 190,000 names was later narrowed to about 20,000, and Attorney General Rob Bonta has asked of the difference, "What happened to the 170,000? You just got those wrong?"
A U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman said the October 23 letters went to 57 of California's 58 counties — every county except Los Angeles, which had received the same demand on October 13 in a letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter, accompanied by the county's list on a password-protected drive. In Contra Costa County, elections spokesperson Dawn Kruger said: "This letter came to us 11 days before Election Day with an unenforceable 48-hour deadline. Our office is conducting this election in accordance with federal and state laws and that is what we will continue to do." Counties have said they are processing ballots normally while their lawyers review the demand.
Bonta fired back on Saturday. He said the Justice Department acted at President Donald Trump's direction, telling MS NOW: "It is once again the United States Department of Justice politicizing and weaponizing the law to attack its enemies, and it is completely improper." His office declined to comment on the letters specifically. California officials have rejected the demand to set the flagged ballots aside, saying the federal government has not provided sufficient information about how it identified the alleged noncitizens.
The letters land on top of a court fight already running. On October 15 the administration sued California and Los Angeles County, asking a federal judge to block the state from counting mail ballots from the more than 20,000 flagged voters, and on October 16 the Justice Department warned Los Angeles County and state officials they could be liable as abettors of a federal crime if those ballots are counted. On Thursday the department asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene. Separately, the department has charged 28 people it says voted illegally. Election Day is November 3, and under California's automatic vote-by-mail system the ballots were already in most voters' hands when the letters arrived.
The fight is the administration's second road to the same goal. The SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, passed the House of Representatives but has not passed the Senate and is not law. With that road closed for this election, the Justice Department is pressing the case county by county, eleven days out, under the existing federal ban on noncitizen voting.
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