Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to set aside California ballots

The US Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to make California set aside postal ballots linked to a list of people it suspects are not US citizens. The decision leaves the state to continue processing ballots under its existing rules in the 3 November midterm elections.

The justices gave no reason for their decision on Monday. They rejected an emergency request for an injunction while an appeal proceeds; their order was not a final judgment on the wider case.

The Justice Department said it had identified more than 20,000 people who appeared on California’s voter rolls and were likely to be non-citizens. It wanted any postal ballots returned by those people held separately until their citizenship could be checked, rather than cancelled outright.

The figure refers to people on the government’s list, not a confirmed number of votes cast or invalid ballots. California has roughly 23 million registered voters, and more than six million postal ballots had been returned by Sunday, according to state figures.

Non-citizens cannot vote in US federal elections. The administration argued that once a ballot is separated from its envelope and mixed with others, it cannot be retrieved if the voter is later found to be ineligible.

California election officials disputed the reliability of the list, warning that setting ballots aside could prevent eligible citizens’ votes from being counted. They also said identifying and separating the ballots during the election would be logistically impossible.

A district judge rejected the administration’s request on 28 October, finding that the government had not supplied error rates or validation against a reliable benchmark for its matching process. A federal appeals court declined to grant an injunction on 30 October; one judge dissented.

In a separate case, a federal judge had barred the administration from threatening election workers over ballots from voters the government alleged were ineligible. The Associated Press reported that the judge expanded that order on Monday to require advance notice of criminal investigations or prosecutions involving the non-citizen list.