Judge blocks Trump administration from threatening election officials days before midterms

Three days before polls open in a midterm election that will decide control of Congress, two federal courts have rebuffed the Trump administration's drive to flag thousands of California ballots as potentially cast by noncitizens and to pressure the local officials counting them. A judge in San Francisco on October 30 ordered the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to stop threatening or intimidating state and local election workers, while a Ninth Circuit panel the same day declined to force California to set aside ballots from roughly 20,000 voters the government calls "likely" noncitizens.

Two courts, one weekend, a shared rebuff

The Ninth Circuit's order, issued per curiam by Judges Mark Bennett, Patrick Bumatay and Gabriel Sanchez, denied the Justice Department's emergency request to force Los Angeles County and the state to sequester the disputed ballots while the underlying case continues. The panel found the administration had not shown that "the law and facts clearly favor" its position, the heightened standard required because it was asking for a mandatory order rather than simply preserving the status quo. Judge Bumatay dissented. The ruling left intact a decision by a district judge in Los Angeles who had already declined to grant the same relief after a two-hour hearing.

Hours later and 400 miles north, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson granted a temporary restraining order sought by election-worker unions and civil rights groups, barring federal officials from directing local registrars to deny or set aside ballots from specific registered voters based solely on the administration's own eligibility claims. Thompson found that Justice Department and Homeland Security officials had engaged in conduct "likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration" and of "disenfranchising lawful voters," according to a BBC News report on her order. Her order runs through November 16, nearly two weeks after Election Day.

The numbers behind the fight

• About 20,000 California voters are on a federal list the Justice Department calls "likely" noncitizens — down from a far larger tally of roughly 190,000 names that the Department of Homeland Security had floated over the summer.
• In a sample review of 200 names from that list, county officials found more than 40 percent belonged to voters whose registrations had already been canceled, according to a filing cited in wire reporting on the dispute.
• More than 400 Washington state voters were separately flagged in a similar federal demand sent to that state's secretary of state in late October.
• California has roughly 23 million registered voters, and Los Angeles County alone sent outreach mailers to about 4.8 million of them ahead of the November 3 election.
• A Heritage Foundation database cited by BBC Verify lists 24 confirmed convictions nationwide for noncitizen voting between 2005 and 2025 — a two-decade span in which courts have repeatedly found the practice exceedingly rare.

How the dispute escalated over the summer

The confrontation began months before the courtroom fights. Over the summer, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security investigators built a list of people they described as "high-confidence" noncitizens drawn from California's voter rolls. On October 13, the Justice Department gave the state 48 hours to review a pared-down version of that list and begin sequestering matching ballots, a deadline Secretary of State Shirley Weber's office said arrived roughly three weeks before Election Day. The list itself went to Los Angeles County, whose Registrar-Recorder's office confirmed it arrived on a password-protected thumb drive, with the password written on a sticky note; Weber's office said the list was never shared with her.

When state and county officials refused, the Justice Department sued California, Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan on October 15 in the Central District of California, arguing that a 1996 federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 611, together with the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, preempted the state's own ballot-verification procedures. Two weeks later, uniformed Homeland Security officers delivered similar warning letters to county registrars' offices around the state, and the department separately sent letters to election officials in all 50 states regarding record-retention obligations. On October 29, SEIU, AFSCME and allied groups sued the Justice Department in San Francisco, which produced Thompson's order the following day.

Who is caught in the middle

The officials most directly affected are career administrators, not elected partisans. Logan, who has run Los Angeles County's elections since 2008, said his office could not withhold or refuse to count ballots "based solely on unverified allegations," even as it faced federal grand jury subpoenas seeking its internal communications. County registrars in smaller jurisdictions such as Napa and Mendocino reported receiving lists containing people who do not live there. Washington's secretary of state faced a parallel demand over a much smaller group of voters. And the roughly 20,000 Californians named on the disputed list — the large majority of whom, according to the county sample, appear to be inactive or already-canceled registrations rather than active noncitizen voters — now have their ballots at the center of a federal court fight playing out as those ballots are being counted.

"The USDOJ's relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states' protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections."

That statement, from Secretary of State Weber's October 14 release, captures the state's position that California law already requires citizenship to register and that the federal lists have not been substantiated. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said the state will not comply with the sequestration demand. Election-law scholar David Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called the underlying legal theory "fairly frivolous" and described the broader campaign, in comments to reporters, as "a political effort at this point."

The administration's response

The White House and Justice Department did not retreat after the rulings. President Trump criticized Thompson's order on social media on October 31, writing, "Why would they reject fixing Election Fraud?" and vowed to continue pursuing what he calls "Election Integrity." Trump has called noncitizen voting "rampant" and has offered a $1 million reward for tips leading to a conviction for voter fraud, even as independent researchers and the Heritage Foundation's own conviction data point to the practice being rare. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who has pressed the California litigation, has not withdrawn the department's underlying claims.

What happens next

Thompson's restraining order is temporary, and the Justice Department's response is due in a subsequent filing; a fuller hearing on a preliminary injunction is expected in the weeks after the election. The Ninth Circuit's ballot-sequestration ruling leaves the district court's special master in place to examine the accuracy of the federal "likely noncitizen" list, with a further hearing anticipated roughly two weeks out — after ballots have already been counted and, in all likelihood, after winners have been declared. For now, both rulings mean county registrars across California and Washington can continue processing and counting vote-by-mail ballots without segregating any based on the disputed federal list, as the state heads into Tuesday's election for control of the House and Senate.