A US federal judge has rejected a Department of Justice request to segregate thousands of California ballots linked to people federal officials believe are “likely” to be non-citizens.
The emergency application sought to halt the processing of ballots associated with about 20,000 individuals during the midterm elections. California officials argued that the list was unreliable and that intervening so close to polling day could unlawfully disenfranchise eligible voters.
In a 26-page ruling issued on Wednesday evening, US District Judge David Carter refused to grant the temporary restraining order sought by the Justice Department.
Judge Carter said the request would have required state and local authorities to abandon established constitutional election procedures at the last moment. “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,” he wrote.
He also warned that separating the ballots could cause lasting damage if eligible votes were wrongly excluded. “Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred,” the judge wrote. “If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger. This Court declines to be a party to such process.”
Dispute over the California ballots
The Justice Department says ballots cast by non-citizens dilute the votes of US citizens. Federal prosecutors have also said the matter is urgent because ballots are already being processed: once signatures on returned postal ballot envelopes have been verified, the ballots are separated from the envelopes to protect voter confidentiality and cannot then be retrieved individually.
California state and local officials have disputed the accuracy of the federal list. A preliminary analysis by Los Angeles County found that many people included in a small sample did not have active voter registrations, while records indicated that a significant proportion said they had been born in the United States.
Nicolas Bartell, a senior official at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, challenged that analysis in court filings, saying the agency’s review found none of those individuals were US-born. He acknowledged, however, that four might have a claim to US citizenship.
Kassra Oskooi, a University of Delaware political scientist appointed as an expert witness by voting rights groups involved in the case, said he believed the federal matching process used to compile the list was likely to be unreliable.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, urged the court to consider the wider implications of the Justice Department’s action. He described the case as a precursor to further interference in the state’s elections and said the court should not be drawn into what he called a “chilling degradation of democratic values and constitutional principles”.
Judge Carter said the federal government could continue addressing suspected non-citizen voting through criminal prosecutions. The Justice Department says it has charged dozens of people in the past two months with allegedly registering or voting without being US citizens, although voting by non-citizens has been shown by audits and investigations to be extremely rare.
The Justice Department is expected to appeal the decision, and the dispute could ultimately reach the US Supreme Court.
