A federal judge turned back a request from the Justice Department to force California to set aside roughly twenty thousand ballots tied to allegations of noncitizen voting.shift. The New York Times headlined it "Judge Rejects Trump Officials’ Bid to Set Aside California Ballots". The Guardian headlined it "Judge rebuffs Trump DoJ’s bid to force California to set aside 20,000 ballots".
The ruling was quickly appealed by federal officials, and the dispute continued even as ballots were already being counted. ABC News headlined it "Justice Department appeals ruling allowing California to count disputed ballots". CNBC headlined it "Trump admin again loses bid to block California from counting alleged noncitizen votes".
The court again sided against the administration, rejecting a renewed attempt to block the counting of the disputed ballots.
The push was described as an extraordinary intrusion into state election procedures just before voting concluded. "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"1, Mother Jones said. "This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters"2, Al Jazeera English said. "Trump and his administration just lost for the third time this week in their desperate and dangerous attempts to meddle in the California election process with voting already underway and just days before Election Day"3, New York Post said.
The underlying concern was also described as legitimate, pointing to gaps in how noncitizens can end up registered to vote and questioning why state officials resisted further verification. "Noncitizens are getting on the rolls all over the country through the motor voter program. They're going into (the) DMV. Sometimes they're even telling the DMV they’re not citizens, and states are still registering them to vote"4, Fox News said. "It tells you something very revealing and unfortunately badly revealing about California officials that they don’t even want to check"4, Fox News said.
The effort was also described as an attempt to manufacture a crisis from unreliable data and to erode confidence in the vote count. "This was a last-ditch attempt by the Trump administration to use faulty, junk data to deprive eligible voters of their rights and manufacture a non-existent crisis"1, Mother Jones said. "Every minute that goes by, American citizen votes are being diluted in the state of California"3, New York Post said.
Separately, the Justice Department escalated its scrutiny of California elections by issuing subpoenas to state officials and opening a criminal inquiry.
