A federal appeals court just told the Trump administration it moved too fast to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 mail ballots tied to voters the government suspects are noncitizens.
Quick Take
- A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel rejected the Justice Department’s emergency bid to block California from counting about 20,000 mail ballots before Election Day.
- The 2-1 ruling was procedural, not a verdict on whether the ballots were lawfully cast; the case now goes back to the district court.
- Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented and argued the appeals court should have stepped in.
- California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the outcome an early legal win against what he described as a federal attempt to skip normal court procedure.
What The Justice Department Was Trying To Stop
The Justice Department sued California and asked courts to block officials from counting more than 20,000 mail ballots linked to people the federal government believed were likely noncitizens. The request was urgent enough that a three-judge panel held an emergency hearing on a Sunday, over Zoom, to weigh whether to step in before more ballots got processed.
The government’s underlying complaint argued that federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and that California’s practice of mailing and tabulating ballots without verifying citizenship status, after being warned about likely noncitizen voters, conflicted with that law. That is a serious legal claim. But claiming a problem exists and proving it in court with real evidence are two different things, and the appeals court never got to the second part.
Why The Court Sent The Case Back Down
The Ninth Circuit majority said it did not have jurisdiction to act yet. The district court, the panel found, never got a real chance to rule on the Justice Department’s request before the government rushed to the appeals court. In plain terms, the government skipped a step, and the appellate judges would not let it jump ahead in line just because Election Day was close.
The majority went further, saying the claimed emergency was, at least partly, one the Justice Department created itself by waiting too long to file and then demanding instant relief. That is not a small technicality. Courts generally dislike last-minute election orders for good reason, a principle election lawyers call the Purcell doctrine, which warns against changing voting rules or disrupting ballot counts once an election is already underway.
A Dissent, A Partisan Lens, And What Comes Next
Judge Bumatay broke from his two colleagues and dissented from the dismissal, siding with the government’s push for immediate appellate action. Reporters were quick to note the panel’s makeup, two Trump appointees split on the outcome alongside a Biden appointee in the majority, a detail that will likely fuel partisan takes on a ruling that was really about timing and procedure, not the truth of the underlying noncitizen claims.
California pushed back hard on the ground, too. Los Angeles County’s top elections official moved to dismiss the federal effort outright, and Attorney General Bonta publicly accused the Justice Department of trying to bypass the normal court process rather than litigate it properly. Bay Area officials echoed that frustration, saying the federal push disrupted routine ballot processing during an active election.
The Bigger Question Nobody Has Answered Yet
Here is the part that deserves more scrutiny than a procedural headline: how did the government land on 20,000 names? Voter-list matching programs used to flag suspected noncitizens have carried documented error rates between roughly 1 and 2.5 percent in past studies, numbers researchers consider acceptable for broad trends but risky for removing or segregating individual ballots. A famous 2015 claim of mass noncitizen voting was later traced to respondents mistakenly misidentifying their own citizenship status on a survey, not actual illegal votes.
None of that proves California’s ballots are clean, and it does not prove the Justice Department’s list is wrong either. What it does mean is that a number as large as 20,000 needs real verification, name by name, before anyone starts pulling ballots out of the count. The district court now has the chance to force that evidence into the open, which is exactly where this fight belongs before another emergency appeal gets filed.
For now, the ballots keep coming in, the lower court hearing looms, and the real test, whether the government can actually back up its noncitizen claims with hard proof, still hasn’t happened.
Sources:
cbsnews.com, politico.com, edition.cnn.com, ktvu.com, oag.ca.gov, thehill.com, courthousenews.com, supremecourt.gov
