Photo: Wikimedia Commons (see file page for photographer), via Wikimedia Commons.
A federal judge has rejected the Justice Department's emergency request to require California to set aside mail ballots tied to about 20,000 registered voters the government says may be noncitizens, according to Reuters.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied the request for a temporary restraining order on October 28, six days before the November 3 midterm elections. The Associated Press, in reporting summarised by BoldVoices, said more than 3.7 million Californians had already voted and election officials had processed more than 500,000 ballots by the time of the ruling.
"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," Carter wrote, according to Reuters. He said the requested relief would "wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway" and risked discounting the votes of United States citizens.
The judge leaned on the Purcell principle, which discourages federal courts from changing election rules close to an election, and questioned whether the government had shown a likelihood of success, standing, or a clear federal cause of action. California officials argued the government had not supplied the underlying data and methodology needed to assess the list's reliability, which could include U.S. citizens.
The Justice Department said it would appeal, and it filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday evening, according to reporting on the ruling. The department had sued California on October 15, and the Ninth Circuit had earlier declined to intervene at that stage on jurisdictional grounds, sending the matter back to the district court.
What this ruling does not do matters as much as what it does. It does not decide that every person on the federal list is eligible or ineligible to vote, and it does not end the underlying lawsuit. It keeps California's existing ballot-processing procedures in place while the dispute continues, with an appeal now the next step to watch.