The US Department of Justice has moved to dismiss its own lawsuit seeking to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged had been sent to non-citizens.
The filing on Friday said the legal remedy sought by the Trump administration was no longer available because the midterm election had concluded and the ballots would have been mixed with those cast by eligible voters.
The case was brought against California and Los Angeles County after federal officials claimed that people they believed were non-citizens had been sent vote-by-mail ballots. The department had asked for the ballots to be set aside while the voters’ citizenship was checked.
Its motion followed a series of court defeats. A federal judge rejected the request to segregate the ballots, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to intervene and the US Supreme Court turned down the administration’s appeal on Monday.
US District Judge David O Carter had warned that separating the ballots at such a late stage could disenfranchise eligible voters and disrupt the election. He had nevertheless scheduled a hearing for November 13, with a special master due to examine the accuracy of the federal government’s list.
The Justice Department said that process was no longer necessary because, by the time of the hearing, there would be no practical way to identify and remove the disputed ballots from the wider count.
California officials had argued that the list was unreliable and contained legitimate voters. In a preliminary review of 200 names, the Los Angeles County registrar found that more than half had cancelled or inactive registrations, while 38.9% were recorded as having been born in the United States.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the administration had abandoned an “unlawful effort” after losing at every level of the courts. The Justice Department, however, said it was continuing efforts to identify alleged non-citizen voters and remove ineligible people from voter rolls.
California election officials had processed about nine million ballots by early Friday, with nearly five million more still to be counted, according to state figures.
