Judge rejects US bid to set aside California postal ballots

A federal judge has refused to order California to set aside postal ballots linked to more than 20,000 people the US Justice Department suspects are non-citizens. The decision, issued on 28 October, leaves the state’s existing ballot-processing rules in place days before the 3 November congressional elections. It is a ruling on an emergency request, not a final judgment in the lawsuit.

The department wanted ballots returned by people on its list held back from the count until their citizenship could be verified. But the list contains names, not 20,000 confirmed votes. It has not been established how many of those people have voted in this election, or how many are citizens.

The department says immigration officials compared voter records with government data and used third-party software to assess possible matches. Judge David O. Carter found its account of that process too vague to justify the requested order. California disputed the list’s reliability; in a preliminary review of 200 entries cited by the judge, 42.9% had cancelled voter registrations. That limited check cannot establish an error rate for the full list.

There is a concrete basis for investigating some names. The Justice Department said it charged 28 people on the list with offences involving alleged unlawful registration or voting. Those are charges, not convictions, and they do not verify the status of everyone else listed.

Carter also found that the federal ban on non-citizen voting was unlikely to give the department authority to change California’s election procedures. The state requires people registering to vote to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury and checks signatures on postal ballots. The department argued that setting ballots aside would preserve them for later verification; Carter warned that, without a workable way to complete those checks during the election, eligible voters could instead lose their votes.

Federal prosecutors said they would appeal. An earlier appeal, brought before Carter ruled, was dismissed because the appeals court said it lacked jurisdiction at that stage; it did not settle the underlying case.