Supreme Court rejects Trump administration’s bid to set aside 20,000 California ballots

WASHINGTON  — Acting quickly and emphatically, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down the Trump administration’s bid to set aside ballots from 20,000 California voters who the administration alleges may not be citizens.

The justices dismissed the emergency appeal without comment or dissent — a rare rebuke for President Trump’s lawyers.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer had appealed Monday and said the court must “segregate” these California ballots before they are processed by state and local elections officials and counted.

The appeal went to Justice Elena Kagan, who oversees the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In the normal course, she could have asked California’s lawyers to respond.

Instead, the court issued a one-line order: “The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied.”

The dismissal continued a string of losses in election-related litigation for the Trump administration in recent days and marked a substantive rebuke to a signature campaign by the president and his supporters to force the administration’s will on a state election as votes are being counted.

It was cheered by California leaders. “Glad SCOTUS agrees that Trump’s attacks on California’s elections are BASELESS and UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on X.

“This latest decision should put an end to the Administration’s attempt to disrupt California’s elections through emergency court orders. But our work is not over,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said. “We will remain vigilant and keep fighting back against federal efforts to undermine our democracy.”

The decision left no clear path forward for the Trump administration’s demands that the ballots be set aside in time to preclude their counting, which Justice Department attorneys appeared to acknowledge.

Shortly before the Supreme Court’s order, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead prosecutor in L.A. who argued the case before the lower district court, said the government’s lawsuit would essentially be “moot” if intervention wasn’t prompt. “The time for action is now,” he said.

The administration previously lost before a federal judge in Los Angeles and twice at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Those judges said that Trump’s lawyers were wrong on the Constitution — that it reserved power over elections to the states and Congress, not the executive — and that their complaint came too late for this election.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted the administration’s appeal as baseless after repeated losses in the lower courts, and the government’s claim of an emergency as dubious given its own actions in recent days.

“Trump and his administration have never understood what ‘NO’ means, and it appears after being told ‘NO’ three times last week they’re still unsure. After they sat on this for more than three days, they now ask for ‘emergency’ relief on the eve of the election,” Newsom wrote on X. “Just another reason their claims are bogus.”

After the Supreme Court’s order, Newsom simply wrote: “Justice is served.”

In May, more than 23 million Californians were registered to vote, with registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans nearly 2 to 1. Still, Trump claimed without evidence last week that “there are hundreds of thousands of bad ballots, bad votes, in California. Millions, in my opinion.”

More than 6.4 million ballots had already been cast as of Sunday, according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office. Those ballots are already being counted, per California law.

In mid-October, the Trump administration sued and said federal courts should require California and Los Angeles County to “set aside vote-by-mail ballots from persons identified by the federal government likely to be non-citizens.”

The lawsuit was filed just days after Justice Department officials gave Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a 48-hour deadline to begin cooperating with federal authorities by setting aside ballots from about 20,000 voters the administration had determined may not be citizens.

Weber, Logan and a host of voter advocacy groups and election experts have questioned the reliability of the administration’s list, which was compiled using a mix of voter data purchased from California and taken from commercial platforms, according to administration officials.

County officials and analysts with the UCLA Voting Rights Project have said the lists encompass U.S. citizens and others who are not registered to vote. A Justice Department attorney, in a separate case Monday, acknowledged the lists have a “high error rate.”

Attorneys for the state argued that complying with the administration’s demands while voting is already underway would be impossible without causing widespread disruptions to the election and would disenfranchise legitimate voters incorrectly swept up into the administration’s unreliable lists.

Justice Department officials stressed that they were asking only for ballots from the flagged voters to be set aside while state and federal authorities work together to determine whether the voters are citizens — something they have said could be accomplished relatively quickly if the state would simply comply with its requests to collaborate.

They also said emergency intervention from the courts was necessary because California law allows ballots to be counted before election day, and once a ballot is cast in person or removed from its mail envelope, it cannot be resegregated from the vote total.

Federal law says that within 90 days of an election, officials may not “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”

Separately, the Supreme Court also has repeatedly frowned on “late-breaking, court-ordered rule changes” involving elections.

Usually, federal laws are deemed to be the “supreme law” and override state laws that are in conflict. No one disputes that U.S. prosecutors may bring criminal fraud charges against noncitizens who violate a federal law by registering with a state to vote and casting an illegal ballot.

But election rules and procedures are different. The Constitution says “the Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each state,” unless Congress acts by law to “alter” its regulations.

The 9th Circuit judges in Friday’s opinion referenced that constitutional divide.

“If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts,” said Judges Mark J. Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, a Biden appointee.

Dissenting Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, a Trump appointee, called the administration’s proposal to separate the 20,000 ballots a “reasonable request” and a “modest remedy” for the problem of illegal voting.

The majority cited a 2013 opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

“The Elections Clause functions as a default provision,” he wrote. “It invests the states with responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections,” unless Congress adopts a different rule.

Scalia spoke for a 7-2 majority that rejected an Arizona law that required voters to show documentary proof of their citizenship when registering to vote. In the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, Congress said voters may register to vote by filling out a form and attesting under oath they are citizens.

California does the same under state law.

Scalia said the federal voter registration law did not allow Arizona to adopt new and stricter rules.

In dissent, conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would go further to protect the states from federal interference in elections.

“Given states’ exclusive authority to set voter qualifications and to determine whether those qualifications are met,” Thomas said, the Arizona restriction should have been upheld.

“The Constitution reserves for the States the power to decide who is qualified to vote in federal elections,” Alito added.

Election law experts had slammed the Justice Department’s attempted intervention in California’s election and had predicted a loss before the high court.

“The Supreme Court should and I believe will reject the administration’s nervy last-minute attempts to meddle in California’s elections,” said Walter Olson at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Mar-a-Lago, which has been calling the shots on this, needs to get this through its head: unless and until Congress provides clear legal guidance to the contrary, the Constitution reserves these decisions to the states.”

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.