The Supreme Court rejects a DOJ push to separate California ballots

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a last-minute request from the Department of Justice to wade into its unprecedented feud with California over the state's voter rolls.

The court denied taking up the Justice Department's appeal on Monday evening, just hours after it was filed. Election Day is Tuesday.

The appeal was the department's latest foray into state election administration, which a federal judge referred to last week as "a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials."

After that judge, David Carter, a Clinton appointee, and a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected the DOJ's request to order California to set aside and stop processing the ballots of thousands of people, the DOJ sought injunctive relief from the high court.

The DOJ says it has identified 20,000 "likely" noncitizens on California's voter roll whose ballots should not be counted until their citizenship can be verified.

Courts so far have sided with California and Los Angeles County's arguments that the federal government's list is unreliable, and that creating a novel system to segregate ballots while voting is already underway is infeasible.

"[T]here is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County's entire election," 9th Circuit Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote in their Friday decision rejecting the Justice Department's emergency request.

The two judges cited longstanding legal precedent, known as the Purcell principle, that election rules should not be altered on the eve of an election, as well as the fact that the Constitution gives states authority to run elections. The opinion also cited the National Voter Registration Act, which bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election.

The panel's third judge, Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.

The actual number of ballots in dispute is likely much smaller than 20,000, since county election officials have found that many of the people on DOJ's list did not have active voter registrations and were not mailed ballots.

Over the weekend, data scientists at University of California Los Angeles' Voting Rights Project were granted access to the DOJ's list through a court order in another lawsuit and found that 42% of the names on the list do not appear on California's current voter roll. That analysis also found naturalized citizens on the DOJ's list.

The Supreme Court's refusal to intervene comes as the Justice Department has been escalating its feud with California election officials.

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice has sent subpoenas to election officials in California, and reminded officials that they could be criminally prosecuted for allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.

A federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order late Friday barring the Trump administration from threatening, intimidating or coercing election officials to demand they stop processing the ballots of registered voters that the federal government alleges are ineligible to vote. The federal government has appealed the order.
Copyright 2026 NPR