Election Litigation: Federal Court Case Over 20,000 Ballots Ends
The Justice Department dropped its bid to halt the counting of disputed ballots in California, citing the inability to separate them from valid votes.
By Robert Marshall ·
Roughly 20,000 ballots in California will proceed to the counting process after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss its own lawsuit on Friday. The federal government had sought to stop the state from counting these specific ballots until the immigration status of the voters could be verified. By filing for dismissal, the Department of Justice effectively conceded that the legal remedy was no longer feasible.
The move comes days after Republican candidates suffered losses in the midterm elections and one week before a scheduled hearing. That hearing was to determine the accuracy of the list of suspected noncitizens. California election officials had processed approximately 9 million ballots as of early Friday. Nearly 5 million ballots remained to be counted. The dismissal motion stated that the state would have already mixed the challenged ballots with lawful ones by the time of the hearing.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, argued in earlier court appearances that separating the ballots after election day would be impossible. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, after ballots were sent to 23 million registered voters and hundreds of thousands had already been processed. Once a ballot is processed, the system anonymizes it completely. Essayli stated that his goal was to safeguard the integrity of the election so illegal voting would not affect the upcoming results.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who appointed a special master to evaluate the ballot list in late October, previously denied the federal government’s request. Carter, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, warned that separating ballots at that late stage would risk disenfranchising citizens. His order described the potential impact on the midterm elections as a source of chaos. The special master was also tasked with determining if California had a mechanism to separate the votes.
The dismissal does not end all federal involvement in the election. The Department of Justice continues litigation with immigrant and voting rights groups over its use of the suspected noncitizen list. The administration also appealed a ruling in Alaska that blocked a Democrat’s Senate victory. However, the full brief for that appeal has not yet been filed at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
California prosecutors have arrested more than 30 noncitizens accused of illegally registering to vote in recent weeks. Some of those arrested were also accused of voting in previous elections. Elections clerks across the state received subpoenas to testify before grand juries in November. It is not yet clear who is being criminally charged in those cases, but the Department of Justice does not typically subpoena people it regards as targets of a criminal investigation.
