Mail-in Voting: Court Lets California Count 20,000 Ballots

A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s emergency attempt to stop California from counting about 20,000 mail ballots, ruling on Monday that the Justice Department went to the wrong court too soon and leaving the ballots in the count with eight days to go before the November 3 midterm elections. The 2-1 decision from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest courtroom defeat for the administration’s push to take a larger federal role in running elections, and it arrived in a case the government itself had framed as an urgent test of whether people the administration believes are not citizens should be allowed to vote. It is the first time the Trump administration has asked a court to stop a state from counting votes, and the ruling turns on timing and procedure, not on whether any of the 20,000 people on the government’s list are citizens.

Midterm Elections 2026: What the Appeals Court Decided

The case, United States v. State of California, reached the 9th Circuit on an emergency motion from the Justice Department, which wanted the court to order California to stop counting mail ballots from people on a federal list of more than 20,000 registered voters the government describes as likely noncitizens. A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 on Monday, granting a motion from Los Angeles County to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and denying the government’s emergency request as moot.

The majority’s reasoning was procedural. The court held that the Justice Department had “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” its request before running to the appeals court, and it noted that “at least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit.” In other words, the government sued late and then asked the appeals court to act before the trial judge had finished with the case, and the panel refused to short-circuit that process.

The two judges in the majority were Judge Mark J. Bennett, appointed by President Donald Trump, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, appointed by President Joe Biden. Bennett wrote separately that he would also have denied the government’s request on the merits, going further than the jurisdictional ruling and signaling that the bid would have failed even if the court had reached the substance. Sanchez wrote in a concurring opinion that the injunction the government wanted “would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway,” and that the federal government “asks the federal court to dictate to a state legislature a matter squarely within the state’s traditional domain, upending the state’s policies in this regard and inviting disorder and confusion for voters and election officials alike.”

The dissent came from Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, who said the court should have blocked the state from processing the ballots. The split among the judges, including two appointed by the president whose administration brought the case, underlines how unusual the government’s request was: an emergency order to change how a state counts votes in the middle of an election that voters are already casting ballots in.

The 20,000 Names on the Government’s List

The Justice Department filed its lawsuit on October 15 in federal court in Los Angeles, naming California and Los Angeles County. The suit asked a federal judge to order the state to separate any ballots it received from people on the administration’s list from the rest of the ballots, and not to count them until it had verified that the people who cast them were citizens. The government said the list contained more than 20,000 registered voters it alleged were likely noncitizens, and it said on October 19 that the group included 28 people who had been criminally charged with illegally voting.

What the government did not say is just as important. The lawsuit did not indicate how many of the 20,000 people on the list had actually submitted a mail ballot, and the administration has not explained how the list was assembled. Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti said the Justice Department’s lawyer could not say where the list came from, only that it had been bought from a third party. That gap in the record became a central point for California’s lawyers, who argued in court filings that the state’s safeguards against noncitizen voting are robust and that the Justice Department’s assertions relied on “suspect data.”

California’s Secretary of State, Shirley Weber, pushed back hard in an October 20 court filing. “At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt,” her lawyers wrote. “At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.” The state argued that pulling ballots out of the count on the basis of an unverified list, days before the election, would risk throwing out lawful votes from citizens who happen to share a name or a data point with someone on the list.

Voting rights activists have raised a related concern about the administration’s methods for scrutinizing state voter lists to identify noncitizens, warning that the approach risks wrongly flagging naturalized American citizens for removal from the rolls. The fear is that a list built from commercial data and matched loosely against voter registrations could sweep in people who became citizens years ago and have voted legally ever since, and that those voters would have little time to prove their status before the election is over.

How Rare Is Noncitizen Voting?

The dispute sits on top of a factual question that has been studied repeatedly: how often do noncitizens actually vote? All available evidence indicates that ineligible voting, including noncitizen voting, is exceedingly rare. A Reuters investigation published in July found just 129 cases in which noncitizens were federally charged with voting illegally, and many of those appeared to stem from voter confusion or administrative errors rather than intentional fraud.

That finding is consistent with the broader record. Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and states check citizenship through voter registration forms, motor vehicle records, and other databases. Cases of noncitizen voting that do surface tend to involve people who misunderstood their eligibility, or errors in the registration process, not organized schemes. The administration’s own figure in the California case, 28 people criminally charged out of a list of more than 20,000, points in the same direction: even on the government’s numbers, the overwhelming majority of the people on the list have not been accused of any crime.

The gap between the scale of the list and the scale of the charges is part of why the courts have been skeptical. If the government wants a state to stop counting thousands of ballots, judges expect evidence that the ballots are unlawful, not a list whose source the government’s own lawyer could not identify in court. California’s argument, that the list is built on suspect data and that the remedy would disenfranchise lawful voters, draws directly on that gap.

The administration sees it differently. It has made alleged noncitizen voting a central theme of its second term, and it argues that states cannot be trusted to police their own rolls. The Justice Department has told election officials in all 50 states that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly allowed noncitizens to remain on their rolls or cast ballots, and it has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to provide complete voter rolls including voters’ sensitive personal data. It has lost 26 of those cases so far without winning one, a record that suggests courts are unconvinced by the government’s approach to state election records.

Early Voting and the Fight for the House

The timing of the California case is no accident. The midterm elections are eight days away, and California is the biggest prize on the map. It is the most populous state in the country and a Democratic stronghold, and it holds 52 seats in the House of Representatives, more than any other state. Democrats are seeking to regain control of the House from the president’s fellow Republicans, and every seat in California matters to that arithmetic.

Governor Gavin Newsom welcomed the appeals court’s ruling and urged Californians to vote early. Attorney General Rob Bonta said the Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, power over how elections run, a point that goes to the heart of the case. The Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states, with Congress setting the timing, and the administration’s attempt to have a federal court dictate California’s counting rules in mid-election ran directly into that design.

Trump has made California a focal point of his sweeping immigration crackdown since returning to the White House, accusing the state of undermining public safety through its so-called sanctuary state policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. He has long asserted that California’s immigration policies have facilitated voter fraud, a claim that the state’s election officials and independent researchers dispute. The lawsuit is the sharpest expression yet of that conflict: not a speech or a policy dispute, but a federal attempt to stop a state from counting votes.

What Happens Next

The immediate next step is in the trial court. The lower court judge has scheduled a hearing on Tuesday in the case, and the Justice Department will have to make its argument there first, which is what the appeals court said it should have done all along. If the government loses at the district court level, it can return to the 9th Circuit with a proper appeal, and the question of whether the ballots should be counted could come back before the same judges.

The administration also has other options. It could ask the appeals court to reconsider, or it could seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court, though the justices are generally reluctant to change election rules in the final days before voting. The more likely path is a fast-moving district court fight over the next week, with the government pressing its claim that the ballots are unlawful and California arguing that the list is unreliable and the remedy would disenfranchise lawful voters.

For California voters, the message from the appeals court is simple. The ballots they have already cast will be counted, the election will proceed on the rules the state legislature set, and any attempt to change those rules in the middle of the vote will have to survive a court process that the government tried to skip. The ballots targeted by the administration can be counted for now, and the fight over whether they should be counted at all moves to a courtroom on Tuesday.

Source: Reuters