California mail ballots face Supreme Court challenge from Trump administration

The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court on Monday to require California election officials to separate mail-in ballots submitted by individuals whom federal authorities suspect are not American citizens.

The emergency filing follows decisions by lower federal courts rejecting the Justice Department's demands to halt the counting of ballots from over 20,000 individuals flagged on a federal list. The legal showdown comes directly ahead of Tuesday's voting deadlines, with more than six million mail ballots already processed out of the state's 23 million registered voters, according to figures released by California election authorities. Voting throughout the state has been ongoing since early October.

Federal attorneys turned to the highest court after a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 on Friday against mandating the separation of the disputed ballots. That decision upheld a ruling issued last Wednesday by U.S. District Judge David Carter, who declined to grant a temporary restraining order against the state and Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County.

In his ruling, Carter warned against disenfranchising legitimate participants based on unreliable federal data. He stated that constitutional protections and democratic integrity outweighed the government's demands, emphasizing that individuals who followed state registration procedures should not lose fundamental voting access due to questionable procedures.

In the administration's appeal to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that segregating the specific ballots is necessary to prevent invalid votes from diluting lawful ballots. Sauer contended that once election workers combine the questioned ballots with the rest of the pool, separating them later becomes impossible, which would undermine the court's capacity to resolve the matter effectively after a full review.

The conflict originated when federal officials sent notices to the California secretary of state and Los Angeles County election administrators containing names of roughly 20,000 registered individuals suspected of lacking citizenship. The Justice Department demanded that any ballots tied to those names be held apart and left untabulated until citizenship statuses could be verified.

California officials resisted the directive, raising red flags regarding errors in the federal records and warning that legitimate voters could be improperly disenfranchised on election day. The federal government subsequently filed suit to compel compliance, but judges at both the district and appellate levels have so far declined to grant the requested emergency relief.