US Supreme Court Refuses Trump Administration Bid to Block 20,000 California Ballots

The US Supreme Court has declined to prevent California from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots, rejecting a request from President Donald Trump's administration. The decision came on the eve of the US midterm congressional elections, just hours after the Justice Department filed its appeal. The contested ballots will therefore be counted alongside all others.

The Justice Department is headed by Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal attorney. It says it holds a list of people who are not US citizens but appear on California's voter rolls. On Monday it asked for a "limited injunction" ordering the state to "stop commingling suspected illegal ballots with legal ones" until voters' status could be verified.

What came before

In mid-October the federal government filed a lawsuit based on the same allegations, but a California district court rejected it. Los Angeles District Judge David Carter warned that singling out ballots would "wreak havoc" on the election process and damage voters' trust in democracy. He wrote that democracy is in danger if the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election on the basis of unproven allegations.

The list was compiled by the US Department of Homeland Security. In its response, California said the method used to identify non-citizen voters was likely flawed and full of errors. Last week another federal judge ordered the Justice Department to share the list with an immigrant rights group and with a voting rights watchdog based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A legal filing containing their analysis found that thousands of US citizens appear to have been inexplicably flagged as ineligible to vote. Carter noted that people recently flagged as non-citizens on voter rolls in other states have repeatedly turned out to be naturalised US citizens.

Wider context

Trump has made unfounded claims of election fraud for years, although multiple investigations have found such wrongdoing to be exceedingly rare. In this midterm cycle he has focused on claims that non-citizens are trying to vote, which research and investigations have repeatedly debunked.

California is the most populous US state and leans heavily Democratic, so it is not expected to be competitive for Trump's Republicans. Governor Gavin Newsom, an outspoken critic of Trump, has warned the administration against interfering in the state's voting. Ahead of Tuesday's vote he announced the deployment of election law experts and poll observers, plus a help line for voters to report intimidation or interference. Early voting in California has been under way for several weeks, and hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed.