President Trump’s Justice Department just scored a real election-eve victory at the Ninth Circuit—but it is narrower than the viral headline now racing across social media.
A divided federal appeals panel lifted a temporary order that had blocked the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security from asking state officials to set aside ballots tied to suspected noncitizens and from warning election workers about possible criminal exposure.
That is a meaningful win for the administration.
But it does not force California to segregate the approximately 20,000 disputed ballots at the center of the fight.
Two separate cases produced two different rulings on Monday, and the distinction matters.
The viral alert that brought attention to the new ruling said the Ninth Circuit had allowed Trump’s push to set aside suspected noncitizen ballots.
That shorthand captures the direction of the DOJ’s win, but not the legal limit on what the court authorized.
The Ninth Circuit’s order came in Service Employees International Union v. Department of Justice, a lawsuit brought by two labor unions and two civil-rights groups representing election workers and voters in California and across the country.
Those groups had persuaded a federal district judge to issue a temporary restraining order against the DOJ and DHS without first hearing the government’s opposition. The order barred federal officials from making more ballot-sequestration requests or threatening prosecution against state and local election workers who processed ballots under state law.
The district court also required the federal government to tell every state and local recipient that its earlier demands and prosecution warnings had been enjoined.
The Trump administration appealed.
The appeal reached a three-judge panel led by Chief Judge Mary Murguia, with Judges Consuelo Callahan and Carlos Bea. The government argued that the district court had cut off ordinary executive-branch activity at the moment election officials were handling the disputed ballots.
The panel also treated the 17-day restraining order as an appealable injunction because it extended past the normal 14-day period, required affirmative notices to state and local officials and would remain in force through Election Day.
Judges Carlos Bea and Consuelo Callahan granted the government’s request for a stay, allowing the DOJ’s election-enforcement push to continue while the appeal proceeds. Chief Judge Mary Murguia dissented.
The majority concluded that the government is likely to succeed in challenging the temporary restraining order. It said the Voting Rights Act does not appear to give the private groups a cause of action against the executive branch for the kind of election-law requests and warnings at issue.
The judges also described investigation and prosecution decisions as core executive functions.
Most importantly, the majority drew a line between asking a state to segregate ballots and compelling it to do so.
The federal government may request that California change its procedure, the panel said, even though California remains free to refuse.
The order states that California’s constitutional authority over its own election procedures remains intact.
That is where the second case comes in.
In United States v. California, the Justice Department directly asked the courts to require California officials to isolate ballots associated with people federal agencies described as likely noncitizens.
California said the federal list was unreliable and argued that changing its ballot-processing system on the eve of the midterms could wrongly sideline eligible voters and throw the count into chaos.
A district judge rejected the DOJ’s request. The Ninth Circuit then refused to grant the emergency injunction in a 2-1 ruling.
The Trump administration took that fight to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s one-line order denied the administration’s emergency application without any publicly noted dissents.
The order addressed the administration’s request for an injunction in United States v. California. It did not decide the citizenship of anyone on the federal list, resolve the merits of the larger lawsuit or declare that California’s system is lawful in every respect.
It answered the urgent question in front of the justices: whether California should be required, immediately before Election Day, to identify and isolate ballots linked to the government’s list while litigation continued. The answer was no.
Because the emergency application was denied, the lower-court result remained in place and California could continue using its existing procedures. The justices gave no written explanation, and no justice publicly recorded a dissent.
The Associated Press reported that the Supreme Court declined to intervene in the dispute involving roughly 20,000 people the administration flagged as likely noncitizens on California’s voter rolls.
No justice publicly dissented, and the high court did not explain its reasoning—standard practice for many emergency orders.
The AP also reported that California had already been voting for weeks, with more than 6 million ballots returned. State officials said the federal list appeared to contain errors and argued that finding and separating particular ballots at that stage could disrupt a system serving roughly 23 million registered voters.
Justice Department officials took the opposite view. They said holding the ballots temporarily would preserve lawful votes while citizenship was checked and prevent ballots tied to potentially ineligible voters from becoming impossible to separate after processing.
The practical result is that California cannot be forced by that lawsuit to hold the disputed ballots apart before their citizenship status is resolved.
The later Ninth Circuit ruling did not reverse that outcome.
Instead, it removed a separate restriction on what federal officials may say and do while urging states to cooperate and investigating possible violations of federal election law.
In plain English: the DOJ may ask, warn and investigate. California still does not have to obey the request to segregate the ballots.
The Ninth Circuit majority said the distinction was decisive.
It noted that the state’s authority to administer its election had already survived the government’s direct attempt to compel a different procedure. The new case asked whether federal agencies could continue requesting that procedure and warning officials about federal law.
The majority said they likely could.
Murguia’s dissent argued that the two rulings cannot be reconciled. She said the government was effectively trying to obtain through threats of prosecution what it could not obtain through a direct court order.
She also warned that election workers could face pressure for following state procedures that the courts had just left in place.
The majority rejected that reading and emphasized the executive branch’s traditional authority to investigate and prosecute suspected election crimes.
Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The unresolved factual dispute is whether the people on the government’s list are actually noncitizens and whether California’s existing procedures are adequate to prevent ineligible votes from being counted without disenfranchising citizens.
The administration says failing to segregate the ballots risks permanently mixing unlawful votes with valid ones.
California says the list contains errors and that a last-minute segregation order could sweep lawful voters into an unworkable emergency process.
Monday’s rulings leave that collision in an unusual posture.
Trump’s DOJ lost its bid to make California set the ballots aside.
Hours later, it won the right to keep pressing the states, warning officials and pursuing lawful investigations while the broader litigation continues.
The viral shorthand skips the most important limit: California remains free to reject the DOJ’s request.
The administration nevertheless regained room to press its case, warn officials about federal law and pursue investigations on the eve of Election Day—a consequential Ninth Circuit victory in its own right.
Continue reading...
[ H/T WLT Report ]
