Seeking an extremely fast shadow-docket decision from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is asking the justices to grant them emergency relief in their quest to sequester 20,000 California mail-in ballots that they say came from suspected non-citizens.
The political theater continues over 20,000 ballots that are not even likely to be consequential in any major races in a state of 23 million registered voters. And lower courts, including the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, have already repeatedly denied the Trump Administration's last-ditch effort to cast doubt on California's elections, and to potentially disenfranchise citizens trying to cast legitimate ballots.
As CBS News reports, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday, one day ahead of Election Day, seeking an emergency ruling that would require postal workers to set aside mail-in ballots from a list of 20,000 suspected non-citizens — a list whose accuracy has been called into question for multiple reasons.
It's unclear how this process would even work, and the effort appears to be just one more effort by President Trump to foment confusion and prepare to call the entire election rigged or unfair when he is unhappy with the results.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer, in today's filing at the Supreme Court, wrote, "Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back." And he said the administration was seeking a "modest remedy" to keep these potentially invalid votes from "diluting" valid ones.
The emergency filing comes one week after the Justice Department sent letters to California county registrars and other officials demanding that ballots from these 20,000 purported noncitizens be sequestered. And those letters came a little over a week after the DOJ's unprecedented civil lawsuit demanding that California not tabulate votes from these suspected noncitizens — without explaining how the government had even compiled their list.
"Federal law explicitly prohibits systematic purges of voters in the period before the election. This is because of the great risk of serious mistakes being made and eligible voters being wrongfully removed," wrote UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen in response to the DOJ's efforts.
And legal experts said that the lawsuit itself was fairly inept, in that it did not even cite a federal statute that gives the government grounds for bringing the suit — citing only a law that is meant to criminalize the act of voting by a noncitizen when they commit that act themselves.
"This is a civil lawsuit against a state asking the court to issue injunctive relief requiring the state to take certain actions in order to, I guess, avoid creating the possibility that some individual might commit this crime?" said Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, speaking to the Chronicle. He referred to the suit as "another step in an increasingly desperate campaign that is destined to fail."
U.S. District Judge David Carter shot down the DOJ's legal effort last week writing, "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. In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too."
Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, added that the government's list of names did not seem "credible," and he wrote, "Constitutional rights and our democracy are at stake. The public interest favors their protection."
We now await the high court's response.
Previously: Department of Justice Tells Multiple California Counties to Verify 'Noncitizen' Ballots
