Federal judge rejects Trump administration demand to set aside 20,000 California ballots

Capitol Alert National admin October 29, 2026 0 Comments

Federal judge rejects Trump administration demand to set aside 20,000 California ballots

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s effort to force California to set aside the ballots of some 20,000 voters the Justice Department says may not be U.S. citizens.

The ruling by Judge David Carter is the latest development in a fast-moving set of civil and criminal cases growing out of a dataset developed by the Department of Homeland Security that purports to flag possible noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls.

Carter took a strong stance in his written ruling Wednesday evening.

“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,” the judge wrote in his 26-page ruling.

“The DOJ’s actions,” he continued, “are indicative of a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials.”

The Justice Department demand was part of a lawsuit the Trump administration filed against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and the County of Los Angeles on Oct. 15, two days after it sent letters demanding that ballots from people named on its list be set aside until their citizenship status could be verified. On Monday, prosecutors sent similar letters to every county in the state, including Sacramento.

Last week, federal prosecutors in California charged 28 people they said had registered or voted illegally. A judge in a separate case called the government’s list “flawed” and barred investigators from using it to interrogate people until after the Nov. 3 election. On Wednesday, civil rights groups filed another federal lawsuit, saying the dataset violates laws banning unequal treatment of naturalized citizens.

Being registered to vote when not eligible is a misdemeanor under federal law, generally prosecuted on an individual basis. It is highly unusual for the federal government to ask a state to set aside votes from large numbers of people it believes may be registered improperly.

Disenfranchising legitimate voters

The government says ballots cast by people on its list must be set aside in order to protect the integrity of crucial midterm elections.

But during an hourslong hearing on Tuesday, Carter expressed skepticism, saying that setting aside so many ballots could disenfranchise legitimate voters.

“Some of these may be very valid voters,” said Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton. “And that’s my concern.”

Carter’s ruling was welcomed by voting rights activists, who have criticized the Justice Department list as inaccurate.

“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,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, CEO of the group Common Cause.

The decision comes on the heels of a refusal Monday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene in the case in advance of his decision.

But less than two hours after Carter issued his ruling, the Trump administration filed a notice of appeal, sending the question back to the Ninth Circuit.

“The district court denied our emergency request to sequester ballots from 20,000 suspected noncitizens,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli said in a statement posted on the platform X, formerly Twitter. “Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials. This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens.”

The lawsuit may ultimately be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Carter’s rejection of the Republican administration’s request for a temporary restraining order against the state was cheered by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

“Our country’s legal system is standing up to the President’s authoritarian attempts to remain in power unchecked and unchallenged,” Newsom said.

The federal government, said Attorney General Rob Bonta in a Wednesday evening statement, will not be able to deprive people of the right to vote based on questionable information.

“No administration can disenfranchise thousands of individuals or disrupt an ongoing election based on highly unreliable claims of noncitizenship,” Bonta said.

In his analysis, Carter said that the government’s request to force California to set aside the ballots “violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections.” It also likely violates the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, federal voter registration laws and federal election law, Carter wrote.

Historically, tensions over suffrage meant that even after marginalized groups including women and African Americans were granted the right to vote, some sought to prevent them from exercising it, Carter wrote, suggesting that the government’s lawsuit and demands were of a piece with such efforts.

“Every generation in our history has witnessed repeated clashes between those who seek to limit access to the ballot and those who fight to ensure it,” Carter wrote.

In his ruling, Carter rejected nearly all of the arguments that the Justice Department made in his courtroom on Tuesday.

The claim that California was interfering with law enforcement by refusing to set aside the ballots was not persuasive, Carter wrote, because the Justice Department still retained the ability to investigate voting-related crimes.

“The United States, by its own admission, is actively enforcing this law,” Carter wrote. “The very same day the United States filed its (request for a) Temporary Restraining Order in this court, the Department of Justice brought charges against 28 individuals.”

Wreaking havoc on an election

Carter also rejected the federal government’s assertion that it had the right to pursue an order in court over the list because it included people who were “likely” to be noncitizens — whose votes the DOJ said would dilute those of citizens.

Such a claim is “too tenuous” to establish the federal government’s need or right to intervene, he said.

He cited a declaration by Los Angeles County Assistant Registrar Recorder Aman Bhullar, who recounted his effort to verify the accuracy of the list.

Bhullar’s team researched a sample of 200 names on the list provided by the government, to find that 71% of the people on it had never voted, the declaration said. Half of the names on the list did not indicate active voter registrations, Bhullar said.

Lawyers for the Justice Department told Carter in court on Tuesday they had developed the list by cross-checking a commercially purchased dataset that contained portions of California’s voter rolls against government lists of people who had been assigned numbers in the federal immigration system.

But the list did not include Social Security numbers or other high-level identifying information, so analysts used the public records research tool LexisNexis to further identify people on the list.

Opponents countered that any dataset created in that way would likely be inaccurate.

Rather than upend an election already in process by segregating thousands of ballots, the Justice Department should prosecute people individually if they violate the law, Carter wrote.

Granting the government’s request “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens,” Carter wrote.

“The Executive Branch cannot replace the remedy Congress carefully enacted with its own unlawful and unconstitutional solution instead.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

This story was originally published October 28, 2026 at 8:40 PM with the headline “Federal judge rejects Trump administration demand to set aside 20,000 California ballots.”