Madar (International) - US District Judge David Carter on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, rejected a Justice Department request to temporarily halt California from counting mail ballots from a list of about 20,000 alleged noncitizens, six days before the midterm elections, Al Jazeera English reported, citing Reuters.
"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.
The judge, appointed in 1998 by Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the last-minute request to exclude more than 20,000 ballots ran afoul of "longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections". The Justice Department swiftly appealed to the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals and did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
The department filed the lawsuit on October 15, a rare intervention weeks before Tuesday's vote, which will decide control of Congress. According to Reuters, President Donald Trump's administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least 13 states.
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in US federal elections, and legal experts say there is scant evidence that it is widespread. California says its safeguards are robust and that the department relied on "suspect data". Election litigation tracker Democracy Docket reported that one in four voters on the list in Los Angeles County were born in the US.
