Election Litigation: DOJ Withdraws California Ballot Challenge

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion on Friday to dismiss its own lawsuit against California, ending a legal bid to halt the counting of approximately 20,000 ballots cast by individuals the government alleged were noncitizens. The move occurs less than a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was set to review the accuracy of the voter list in question.

The dismissal request follows days after Republican candidates suffered losses in the midterm elections. In the filing, federal prosecutors stated that the state will have already mixed the disputed ballots with valid ones by the time the court meets. The motion claimed that the specific relief the United States sought is no longer available, making voluntary dismissal the necessary course of action.

California election officials reported processing roughly 9 million ballots as of early Friday. They indicated that nearly 5 million ballots remained to be counted. State representatives previously contended that the list of suspected noncitizens provided by the federal government was outdated and included legitimate voters. Judge David O. Carter, a federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton, echoed these concerns in an order denying the government’s initial request. Carter warned that separating ballots at a late stage would risk disenfranchising citizens and would wreak havoc on the midterm elections.

The lawsuit was originally filed in mid-October, after ballots had been mailed to all 23 million registered voters in the state. By that time, hundreds of thousands of ballots had already been processed and anonymized. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, argued that the goal was to safeguard election integrity rather than chase illegal votes after the fact. He stated the aim was to stop illegal voting before it impacted the upcoming election results.

This legal action was part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to assert control over state-run elections. President Donald Trump has claimed such elections are rife with illegal voting, a position the administration has pursued without providing public evidence. The Department of Justice remains involved in other litigation with voting rights groups seeking to limit the use of the suspected noncitizen list. A separate suit filed in Alaska at the president’s direction to block a Democratic Senate victory was dismissed by a federal judge. The administration is appealing that ruling but has not yet filed a full brief at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

While the federal case is being withdrawn, state prosecutors continue their own investigations. California prosecutors have arrested more than 30 noncitizens accused of illegally registering to vote in recent weeks. Some of the accused are also charged with voting in previous elections. In the week before the election, elections clerks across the state received subpoenas to testify before grand juries set to convene in November. It remains unclear who is being criminally charged in those specific cases, though the department does not typically subpoena individuals it regards as targets of a criminal investigation.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California referred questions regarding the dismissal to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. The department did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Friday evening. The special master appointed by Judge Carter in late October would have evaluated whether California election officials actually possessed a mechanism to separate the disputed ballots from the rest of the total.