Update: The Supreme Court turned down the Trump administration’s request Monday evening. Read the latest here. Our earlier report appears below.
Washington — The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to intervene in its effort to require California election officials to set aside mail-in ballots cast by thousands of people the government alleges are not U.S. citizens.
The Justice Department sought emergency relief after a federal appeals court on Friday declined to order California officials to separate ballots submitted by more than 20,000 people identified on a government list of suspected noncitizens.
More than 6 million mail ballots had been returned statewide by Sunday, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Voting began in California in early October, and the state has more than 23 million registered voters.
The emergency filing arrived as the legal fight accelerated ahead of Tuesday’s elections. So far, the Trump administration has failed to persuade lower courts to require officials to quarantine the ballots in question.
In its Supreme Court filing, however, Solicitor General D. John Sauer characterized the government’s request as a “modest remedy” intended to ensure that ballots cast by noncitizens do not “debase or dilute valid votes.”
“Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” Sauer wrote. “The only way to preserve the district court’s ability to grant relief to the United States after a full merits proceeding, therefore, is to segregate the challenged ballots now.”
YOU MAY ALSO READ: Final Senate Polling Shows Deep Divisions Ahead of 2026 Races
The dispute began when the Justice Department sent letters to California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County’s chief elections official. The letters included a list of 20,000 people the department said were registered voters but not U.S. citizens, and demanded that any ballots they returned be separated and withheld from tabulation until their citizenship was confirmed.
State and county officials, however, questioned the list’s reliability and warned that the process could wrongly disenfranchise eligible voters.
The Justice Department then sued California and Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder and county clerk, seeking a court order that would require the ballots to be segregated.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge David Carter rejected the Trump administration’s request for a temporary restraining order preventing election workers from counting ballots linked to the alleged noncitizens.
“Constitutional rights and our democracy are at stake. The public interest favors their protection,” Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote. “Individuals who have met the requirements of California’s voter registration laws must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors.”
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit later split 2-1 on Friday, rejecting the Justice Department’s request to have the ballots separated and barred from counting while officials verified the voters’ citizenship.
