Justices let California count disputed mail ballots

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to pause the counting of 20,000 mail ballots in California. These ballots belong to individuals the Trump administration claims are noncitizens. The decision allows the state to include these votes in the results for Tuesday's midterm elections.

The administration asked the high court to set the challenged ballots aside until officials could verify the voters' citizenship status. The justices did not intervene in the case. They also did not provide a detailed reason for their decision, a common practice for emergency docket items.

California election officials argued that the list of flagged voters contained numerous errors. They warned that removing the ballots from the count could disenfranchise legal citizens. The state noted that all of its roughly 23 million registered voters received mail ballots in early October. Officials stated that identifying and separating the 20,000 challenged ballots at this late stage would be logistically impossible given that hundreds of thousands have already been processed.

Federal Judge James Boasberg issued a related ruling on Monday. He found that the administration's last-minute demands on California election officials violated the U.S. Constitution. Boasberg wrote that the executive branch likely violated the Elections Clause. This clause assigns authority over election rules exclusively to the states and Congress.

Judge Trina Thompson, a district court judge, previously denied the Justice Department's request to segregate the ballots. During a hearing, Thompson questioned Kenneth Kao, a Justice Department attorney, about the accuracy of the data. Thompson asked if the administration agreed there was a high error rate in the list. Kao responded that it was a fair statement and said the administration needed help from registrars to verify the voters.

Bill Essayli, the federal prosecutor for the Justice Department's Los Angeles office, expressed confidence in the list at a news conference. He stated that the people on the list were not entitled to vote. Essayli later conceded that errors might exist on the list. The administration has faced multiple court losses in its effort to identify noncitizen voters, a group that is rare in national elections.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta criticized the appeal as an attempt to undermine the elections. He said the move trampled on the rule of law. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, had previously warned that segregating the ballots would wreak havoc on the democratic process. A two-judge appeals court panel upheld Carter's order. One judge on the panel, appointed by President Joe Biden, voted in favor of the state. A third judge, appointed by Trump, dissented by arguing that California's refusal to separate the ballots encouraged the violation of federal law.

The Supreme Court's decision comes on the eve of elections that will determine control of Congress for the final two years of Trump's second term. The court previously rejected a push in September to restrict mail ballots nationwide. That earlier decision occurred despite the justices siding with the administration in other emergency appeals.