US midterm elections<\/a>. It is the latest development in a legal battle between the administration and California, a Democratic stronghold and the most populous US state.<\/p>\nCalifornia says the move could disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department wanted the Supreme Court to step in immediately and force California to set aside ballots from voters who appear on a list compiled by the Department of Homeland Security until their citizenship status can be verified.<\/p>\n
The department argues that once the ballots are mixed in with others, there would be no way to identify and remove them if the voters were later found to be ineligible.<\/p>\n
But California says the list is unreliable and could include thousands of US citizens.<\/p>\n
Voting has been under way since early October, with ballots mailed to about 23 million registered voters and hundreds of thousands already processed. State officials say it would be nearly impossible to separate the ballots in question.<\/p>\n
Last week, a federal judge rejected the administration\u2019s request, raising concerns about the reliability of the data on the US Department of Homeland Security\u2019s list.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,\u201d Judge David Carter wrote.<\/p>\n
The administration turned to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court also rejected the request on Friday.<\/p>\n
In September, the Supreme Court rejected an earlier effort to restrict mail-in voting.<\/p>\n
The dispute comes as Republicans fight to retain control of the US Congress in Tuesday\u2019s elections.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly made false claims about widespread voter fraud, but studies and state audits have shown that ineligible voting, including by non-citizens, is rare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Top court declines to block California from counting ballots of voters Trump administration claims are not US citizens.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[35978,13444,1376,3411,43,44,41,39,42,40,772,1690,272304],"class_list":["post-956298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-civil-rights","tag-courts","tag-donald-trump","tag-elections","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada","tag-us-midterm-elections-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}