Los Angeles: A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the US Department of Justice’s efforts to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 California voters it said might not be citizens, slamming the move as brazen pre-election “interference.”
The case sparked an uproar ahead of the November 3 midterms, in which President Donald Trump’s Republican Party is at risk of losing its control of Congress, and appears to represent another attempt to cast doubt on electoral results.
Democratic Party leaders have sued the Trump administration over the request, accusing Republicans of aiming “threats and intimidation” at state and local officials before the vote.
US District Judge David O. Carter agreed, refusing to order the seizure of the ballots and siding with the government of Democratic-led California.
“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,” Carter wrote in his decision.
“Constitutional rights and our democracy are at stake. The public interest favors their protection,” he added.
Those registered on California’s voter roles “must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors.”
The federal government in recent months had accused California of having 190,000 illegal voters on its books.
It recently revised the figure to 20,000 and filed an emergency lawsuit about 10 days ago — after early voting had begun — to stop the state from sending ballots to them.
A similar controversy arose in neighboring Nevada, where the allegations fizzled. The Trump administration had initially identified 16,000 non-citizen voters there, but after verification procedures that number dropped to 185 — and then to zero.
“The DOJ’s actions are indicative of a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials,” Carter wrote in his decision.
For months, Trump — who has never acknowledged his own election defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 — has been claiming that there will be fraud in this year’s midterms.
Studies repeatedly show that while rare cases of voter fraud exist, such incidents are minuscule and do not influence election results.