Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Block 20,000 Disputed California Ballots

The Supreme Court declined Monday evening to block California from counting roughly 20,000 mail ballots the Trump administration says were cast by noncitizens, clearing the way for the ballots to be mixed into the state's count less than 24 hours before polls open nationwide for Tuesday's midterms.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer had filed a 19-page emergency application that morning asking the Court to order California to keep the disputed ballots physically separated from lawful ones while their voters' citizenship could be verified. His argument was blunt: "Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones," the government wrote, there would be no way to ever recover or identify them again. He also asked for an immediate administrative injunction while the Court considered the broader request.

The Court said no. The order came back brief and unsigned, released to reporters shortly before 6 p.m., with no noted dissents. The application first landed with Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency matters out of the Ninth Circuit, and she referred it to the full Court rather than ruling alone. The order did not address the merits of the citizenship claims themselves, just the government's request to freeze the ballots in place.

This was the administration's last stop. U.S. District Judge David Carter had already denied a sequester order on October 28, openly questioning the government's noncitizen allegations. The Ninth Circuit rejected the emergency motion again two days later, on a 2-1 vote. Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented from that panel ruling, writing that California's unwillingness to separate the ballots "encourages the violation of federal law." The two judges in the majority went out of their way to write separately making clear they would not support setting ballots aside this close to an election.

California election officials have disputed the administration's numbers from the start, saying it isn't even established that the roughly 20,000 flagged voters are actually noncitizens. The state's deadline for receiving mail ballots runs through next Tuesday, November 10, meaning the full scope of what got counted won't be final for more than a week after polls close.

Whatever the truth turns out to be about those 20,000 ballots, nobody will ever be able to prove it after today. That was the entire point of the administration's request, and it's exactly what three separate courts, up to and including the Supreme Court itself, decided not to allow. An evidentiary question that could have been resolved before a single vote was counted will now, by design, never be resolved at all.