Supreme Court rejects Trump demand to set aside California ballots
Ruling lands on eve of midterms after DOJ gave officials 48 hours to act on 20,000 unverified names, department has charged 28 green card holders with illegal voting
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Votes cast their ballots at city hall in San Francisco. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
theguardian.com
The US supreme court on Monday rejected the Trump administration's emergency demand that California set aside ballots cast by people the Justice Department claims are non-citizens, ruling on the eve of the midterm elections after weeks of courtroom battles.
The demand originated in mid-October, when the department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento carrying the names of 20,000 people it said sat illegally on the state's voter rolls — and gave the officials 48 hours to act, threatening to sue if ballots from those listed were not sequestered. California refused, arguing the federal government was interfering in a state-run election, and lower courts agreed. On 28 October US district judge David Carter, a Bill Clinton nominee, wrote that '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.'
What the department never supplied was the basis for its list. 'The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,' said Dean Logan, the Los Angeles county clerk, after receiving the drive. Officials who examined it found inaccuracies, and the department declined to explain how the names were compiled. The United States keeps no register of its citizens, so a claim about non-citizens on the rolls can only be assembled from other records — and checked against records that do not exist.
The department also threatened to prosecute election officials who processed ineligible ballots, a threat experts said had no legal basis, and made a parallel segregation demand of Washington state. Its completed prosecutions so far number 28: green card holders in California charged with fraudulent registration and casting illegal ballots, set against a public claim of 20,000. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has offered a $1m reward for any report of voter fraud leading to an arrest or conviction, and years of collected data put non-citizen voting among the rarest offences in American elections.
The ballots the department wanted quarantined will now be counted with everyone else's.