California Ballots Noncitizen Ruling: Judge Refuses to Set 20,000 Votes Aside

The California ballots noncitizen ruling landed on Wednesday, 28 October 2026, six days before the midterm elections. US District Judge David Carter rejected a Justice Department request to temporarily block California from counting mail ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters the department says are likely noncitizens (Reuters via SRN News). Carter did not soften the language. A ruling for the administration, he wrote, would “wreak havoc” and could leave thousands of registered voters losing “the right that generations of Americans have fought to preserve” (Reuters via SRN News).

Information verified through 29 October 2026.

What the Justice Department asked the court to do

The department sued on 15 October, asking for a temporary restraining order that would bar officials from counting any ballots from the people on its list (Reuters via SRN News). Reuters called the filing “a rare intervention in the voting process weeks before an election.” The ballots would not have been destroyed. They would have been segregated, held out of the count while citizenship was checked, in an election already under way.

The list itself is contested ground. CNN reported that the Justice Department built its case on a purchased list of California voters matched against other government data, and that the Department of Homeland Security had claimed in July that 190,000 registered California voters could be ineligible foreigners before the figure narrowed to 20,000 “high confidence” matches, delivered to officials on a thumb drive with a password handwritten on a Post-it note and a 48-hour deadline to act (CNN). Local election officials, in early checks, found a significant share of the names were not on their rolls or sat in suspended status, meaning no mail ballot would go out, and saw indications some flagged people are in fact US-born, a point DHS disputed in court declarations (CNN).

California’s position was simpler. The state said its safeguards against noncitizen voting are strong, the department’s assertions rested on “suspect data,” and complying would risk disenfranchising eligible voters (Reuters via SRN News).

Inside the California ballots noncitizen ruling: “Go out and indict,” the judge said

Carter’s order, 26 pages, rested on who runs elections in the first place. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” he wrote (Reuters via SRN News). Segregating votes on unproven allegations, he added, crossed a line: “Individuals who have met the requirements of California’s voter registration laws must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors” (CNN).

He also pointed the department toward its own toolbox. The Justice Department never explained why counting ballots would impair prosecutions under the federal law against noncitizen voting, Carter wrote, since states are not required to help the federal government investigate crimes (Reuters via SRN News). At the hearing he was blunter, pointing to recent federal action against 28 people accused of voting illegally in California and pressing the government’s lawyers on why criminal enforcement was not the proper route: “You’ve got a remedy, for goodness sakes. Go out and indict” (ENM News).

The state’s lawyers had argued the practical stakes. Anne Bellows called the proposed last-minute citizenship inquiry a “recipe for disenfranchisement,” while Christina McCall told the court the allegations were too vague to justify emergency intervention (ENM News). For the government, First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli argued Washington was not dictating how California runs its election, only setting a boundary on what it may not do (ENM News).

The appeal, and the parallel fights in Alaska and Washington

This case has already visited the appeals court twice in spirit. On Monday, a 9th Circuit panel rejected, 2-1, an emergency Justice Department request made before Carter had even ruled, calling the appeal premature; the majority also signalled the segregation arguments were likely to fail on the merits (CNN). Judge Mark Bennett wrote that the department had been raising concerns about California’s rolls since at least mid-July, making part of the urgency self-created, while Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented, arguing federal law bars California from mixing ballots allegedly cast by noncitizens with legitimate ones (ENM News). On Wednesday evening the department appealed Carter’s ruling again; Essayli said in a statement that “every day, more ballots are processed by election officials” and called the situation an “ongoing emergency” that “disenfranchises American citizens through dilution” (Reuters via SRN News).

California is the biggest of these fights, not the only one. In Alaska, the department asked a judge last week to block certification if the Republican incumbent senator loses narrowly, citing a similar-name candidate; Alaska wants the case dismissed (Reuters via SRN News). In Washington state, it asked officials on Monday not to count ballots from 400 voters it says may not be citizens; the state’s top elections official said the timing suggested an intent to cast unfounded suspicion on results (Reuters via SRN News). California had 23 million registered voters as of December 2025; Washington had 5 million as of 2024 (Reuters via SRN News).

Analysis: Two clocks are running. One is legal: an appeal filed Wednesday evening against a ruling issued the same day, with ballots processed daily. The other is electoral: voting ends 3 November, and any later order faces a count already mixed together. Carter’s ruling hands other states in similar disputes a ready-made argument: states run their elections, and federal fraud claims go through prosecutors, not ballot quarantine. Voting rights activists have warned that list-matching like this risks wrongly flagging naturalized citizens, a concern California’s early checks gave some weight to (Reuters via SRN News). Whatever the 9th Circuit does next, it will do it in public, mid-count.

Photo: Legoktm, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://srnnews.com/us-justice-dept-loses-initial-bid-to-block-votes-from-alleged-noncitizens-in-california/
2. https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/28/politics/judge-denies-trump-bid-california-ballots?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_meta
3. https://enmnews.com/2026/10/28/judge-blocks-trump-bid-quarantine-california-ballots
4. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-justice-dept-loses-initial-bid-block-votes-alleged-noncitizens-california-2026-10-29/