The US Supreme Court has refused a last-minute effort by the Trump administration to intervene in California's midterm vote count, rejecting a request to set aside 20,000 ballots that federal officials alleged may have been issued to people who are not US citizens.
The decision on Monday, November 2, came a day before elections that will decide control of Congress during the final two years of President Donald Trump's second term. Two lower courts had already turned down the administration's request. The Supreme Court's refusal leaves those decisions intact and effectively ends the administration's effort to disqualify the disputed ballots.
The court issued a single-sentence order denying the Justice Department's application for an injunction while its appeal was pending. The application had been submitted to Justice Kagan, who referred it to the full court. A federal appeals court had rejected the government's request to separate the ballots on Friday.
California election authorities have challenged the federal government's method for identifying suspected non-citizens, saying the list it supplied contained numerous errors. They warned that eligible voters could lose their votes as a result and said separating the ballots while voting was already underway was not feasible.
The dispute concerns a small portion of the electorate in the country's most populous state, where about 23 million people are registered to vote. More than six million postal ballots had arrived by Sunday night, according to the California secretary of state's office.
In October, the Justice Department wrote to California's secretary of state and the Los Angeles County Registrar demanding that ballots associated with 20,000 registered voters be set aside. Court documents described those voters as people the administration believed were likely to be non-citizens. Roughly a week later, armed Department of Homeland Security officials delivered letters to county officials and employees throughout California, threatening criminal charges unless they separated the ballots.
The Justice Department argued in a 22-page brief reviewed by the BBC that votes cast by non-citizens could undermine the value of valid votes. The legal effort forms part of a campaign pursued for years by Trump and his administration against alleged widespread voter fraud, although research shows such fraud is extremely rare. Trump has repeatedly accused Democrats of allowing immigrants to vote illegally and has placed much of the blame on postal voting permitted in many Democratic states.
District Judge David Carter sharply criticised the government's actions in a ruling last week, describing them as an “ongoing pattern of attempted election interference”. He said the federal government's attempt, immediately before an election, to pressure state and local authorities into abandoning their constitutional election procedures in favour of the executive branch's demands was unprecedented in American history.
