President Donald Trump's administration asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to temporarily block California from counting mail-in ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters who federal officials allege are likely non-US citizens. Escalating a legal fight that could affect thousands of voters in the November 3 midterm elections, the Justice Department filed the emergency request as it seeks to prevent counting the disputed ballots until each voter's citizenship status can be verified.
A federal appeals court refused the request on Friday. Trump's fellow Republicans are fighting to retain control of Congress in the midterms.
California is the most populous US state and a Democratic stronghold. The administration has intensified its focus on alleged noncitizen voting in the run-up to the midterms.
Trump has made false claims about widespread US voting fraud, including in the 2020 election lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Multiple studies and state audits show that ineligible voting, including by noncitizens, is rare.
The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of administering elections to states, though the federal government has some oversight. The lawsuit marked a rare federal intervention in the voting process and signaled a willingness by the administration to contest the election results in court.
The administration already sought to restrict voting by mail - a mode of casting ballots used more often by Democratic-leaning voters - but the Supreme Court in September rebuffed that effort. The list of 20,000 registered voters was amassed by the US Department of Homeland Security and sent to California officials and to Los Angeles County officials.
The Justice Department sued in federal court on October 15, claiming California is unlawfully preventing its enforcement of a 1996 US law that makes it a criminal offense for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. The department said California's action violated the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which holds that federal law generally preempts state law.
The administration asked the Supreme Court to order California to separate any ballots cast by people on the list from other ballots, and not to count them until those voters are verified as citizens. "Once illegally cast ballots are counted and commingled with lawful votes, the resulting harm is impossible to remedy," the Justice Department wrote in a filing in the case.
California has said that the state's safeguards against noncitizen voting are robust and that the lawsuit threatens to deprive 20,000 people of their right to vote based on vague accusations. The administration's process for scrutinizing voter lists to identify noncitizens is flawed and likely rife with errors, it said in court papers.
US District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles denied the administration's request on October 28. "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," Carter wrote.
Carter raised concerns over the reliability of the administration's data, noting that people recently flagged by the federal government as noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have repeatedly turned out to be naturalized US citizens.