The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to force California to segregate and withhold mail ballots linked to roughly 20,000 registered voters. The San Francisco-based court ruled 2-1, but it did not deliver a final judgment on the underlying claims. The majority said the federal government had not given the district court an adequate opportunity to consider the request, making appellate intervention premature.
The decision comes days before the November 3 midterm elections and sends a significant dispute over election administration back to the trial court. The next key step is a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, October 27, before a federal district judge in California. The appellate ruling therefore focuses on procedure and the timing of emergency relief, rather than conclusively deciding every legal and factual issue in the case.
What the Justice Department requested
The U.S. Department of Justice sued California on October 15 after saying that an analysis conducted with the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 20,000 people on the state’s voter rolls who were “likely” noncitizens. The department asked the court to order California to set aside any mail ballots associated with those names and not count them until citizenship could be verified. That description is the federal government’s allegation; it does not mean a court has established that every person on the list is ineligible.
Reuters reported that federal officials said 28 people on the list had faced criminal charges related to illegal voting. The government did not specify how many of the approximately 20,000 people had actually returned a ballot in the current election. Federal and state law prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The litigation is centered instead on the reliability of the federal list, the eligibility of the named voters and the scope of any remedy that could be imposed while voting is already underway.
California disputes the list’s accuracy
California officials argue that the list contains serious inaccuracies and that a last-minute segregation order could disenfranchise eligible voters. According to an October 26 statement from the California Attorney General’s Office, a preliminary review by Los Angeles County of 200 names found that more than half had canceled or inactive registrations, 38.9% listed a U.S. birthplace and 71.2% had no voting history. Those figures represent the state’s review and have not yet been adopted as final factual findings by the court.
The Associated Press reported that two judges considered appellate action premature, while the dissenting judge argued that federal law required scrutiny of the disputed ballots before they were counted. Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez wrote that the urgency was at least partly the result of the federal government’s own decision to file close to Election Day. In a separate concurrence, Judge Mark J. Bennett questioned the legal basis for an executive-branch demand that California separate the ballots.
What the ruling does — and does not — decide
The Ninth Circuit’s decision does not verify the citizenship status of the roughly 20,000 people, nor does it permanently reject all of the federal government’s claims. It also does not establish that everyone on the list voted. Instead, the ruling says the appeals court should not intervene before the district judge has had a sufficient opportunity to assess the emergency request.
That distinction is central to understanding the case. For now, California’s existing counting process has not been halted by an appellate order. The October 27 district-court hearing could determine the next stage of the government’s effort to have the ballots segregated. As the record develops, questions about how the federal list was created, how many listed voters returned ballots and how the requested remedy could affect eligible citizens are likely to remain at the center of the dispute.
