Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Flag 20,000 California Ballots Hours Before Polls Open

The Supreme Court on Monday evening declined to order California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots the Trump administration says belong to "likely" noncitizens, clearing the way for the state to count all ballots cast in Tuesday's midterm election without the federal segregation scheme the Justice Department had demanded in the final hours before polls opened.

The justices issued a one-line, unsigned order denying the government's emergency application, with no dissent noted, just hours after the Solicitor General's office filed it on Monday afternoon. The denial does not resolve the underlying lawsuit, which the Justice Department filed against California and Los Angeles County on October 15 and which remains pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But it means that, as voters went to the polls Tuesday, no court had ordered any county in California to pull ballots from counting based on the administration's list.

A Dispute That Moved From a District Court to the Supreme Court in Three Weeks

The case began over the summer, when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations obtained California's voter roll and compiled what the Justice Department called a list of "high-confidence" noncitizens it believed were registered to vote in the state. In mid-October, federal officials handed the roughly 20,000-name roster — referred to in court papers as the "October List" — to Secretary of State Shirley Weber's office and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. In an October 13 letter to Weber, Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter asked her to instruct county officials to "segregate — not cancel" the ballots of anyone on the list whose citizenship could not be confirmed, and warned that if California did not comply by October 15, "the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief."

California refused, citing doubts about the list's accuracy, and three days later the Justice Department sued, arguing that the Supremacy Clause and a federal statute barring noncitizen voting, 18 U.S.C. § 611, required the state to withhold the ballots pending citizenship verification. U.S. District Judge David Carter held a two-hour adversarial hearing on October 27 and denied the government's request for a temporary restraining order the next day, writing that the episode reflected what he called a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials, according to CBS News.

The government appealed immediately and asked the Ninth Circuit for an injunction pending appeal. A divided three-judge panel — Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez in the majority, Judge Patrick Bumatay dissenting — rejected that request on October 30, ruling that the Justice Department had not shown the "doubly demanding" standard for a mandatory injunction was met and that nothing in Section 611 preempts California's own statutory scheme for handling citizenship challenges to ballots. The panel noted that California already requires voter applicants to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury and has established processes for challenging ballots and canceling registrations.

"There is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement," the Ninth Circuit majority wrote in its October 30 order.

The Justice Department went to the Supreme Court within days of losing at the Ninth Circuit, filing its emergency application on Monday, November 2. The underlying district court case, United States v. California, No. 2:26-cv-12025, remains open in the Central District of California, and the Ninth Circuit appeal continues on a normal briefing schedule even after Monday's denial.

Disputed Numbers Behind the List

The scale of the dispute has been contested from the start. The Justice Department's figure of roughly 20,000 names has not been independently verified by any court that has reviewed it. A KPBS review of the litigation cited an analysis by UCLA's Voting Rights Project finding that 42 percent of the names on the federal list do not even appear on California's current voter rolls, and that the list includes naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote. County election officials told the district court they lacked a reliable way to match the federal roster to specific mail ballots without risking the disenfranchisement of citizens who share names with the people the government is trying to flag.

California has more than 23 million registered voters, and more than 6 million mail ballots had already been returned statewide by the time the Supreme Court acted, according to CBS News. The National Voter Registration Act separately bars states from conducting systematic voter-roll purges within 90 days of a federal election, a provision the Ninth Circuit majority cited as part of the backdrop against which it evaluated the government's request. In recent weeks the Justice Department has also sent subpoenas to election officials in California and reminded them they could be criminally prosecuted for allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots, a warning that election officials and voting-rights groups have characterized as pressure on workers who are themselves trying to run a lawful election.

The California dispute is the furthest-advanced piece of a broader push. In July, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia giving them five days to describe how they planned to deter noncitizen voting, warning that officials "could be criminally prosecuted for aiding noncitizen voting." California was already a defendant in earlier Justice Department litigation over voter-list maintenance filed last year, before the current dispute over the October List began.

The following is a condensed timeline of how the case reached the Supreme Court:

• October 13 — DOJ transmits the roughly 20,000-name list to California, giving the state 48 hours to begin segregating ballots.
• October 15 — California declines; the Justice Department sues the state and Los Angeles County.
• October 27-28 — District Judge David Carter holds a hearing and denies a temporary restraining order.
• October 29-30 — DOJ appeals; a divided Ninth Circuit panel denies an injunction pending appeal, 2-1.
• November 2 — DOJ asks the Supreme Court for emergency relief; the Court denies the application hours later.
• November 3 — Election Day; California counts ballots under its existing procedures.

Reaction From Sacramento and What Comes Next

Secretary of State Weber's office welcomed the ruling in a statement issued Monday, saying the request the administration brought to the Ninth Circuit would have violated the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act and could have disenfranchised eligible voters. "While this fight is far from over, today's order means that millions of Californians can focus on the most important task" at hand, Weber said, adding, "The time to vote is now." California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office defended the state in the litigation, called on the administration, according to Bloomberg Government, to stop "attempts to interfere in California elections through emergency court orders."

The Justice Department's filings have argued throughout the case that allowing California to count ballots from people the government believes are ineligible inflicts irreparable harm on the integrity of federal elections. No court that has reviewed the dispute — not the district court, not the Ninth Circuit, not the Supreme Court — has accepted the government's citizenship list as a reliable basis for withholding ballots from counting.

Monday's order resolves only the emergency request for an injunction pending appeal; it does not end the case. The Ninth Circuit appeal of Judge Carter's underlying ruling continues on its normal schedule, and a separate dispute over Justice Department communications with election officials remains in litigation as well. For Tuesday, the practical effect is narrower but immediate: under the rulings now in place, Los Angeles County and other California registrars are counting mail and provisional ballots according to the state's existing procedures, with no court-ordered segregation process in effect anywhere in the state as polls operate on a day when control of the U.S. House is being contested in more than a dozen competitive California districts.