.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
The United States Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump some immigration-related wins during his second term in the White House. However, with just hours until polling stations across the country open for the midterm elections, the nation’s highest court denied an administration request to temporarily block thousands of possibly ineligible California ballots.
In October, the Department of Justice sued California and Los Angeles County, claiming that more than 20,000 registered voters were suspected noncitizens and requesting that their ballots be held back until citizenship could be verified.
A district judge hadn’t issued a ruling by the deadline, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently dismissed an appeal. Two days later, the district judge, David Carter, denied an injunction requested by the DOJ, and it was back to the 9th Circuit.
The Noncitizen Voting Narrative and the Battle to Prevent It
The Trump administration has yet to prove that any of the voters in question are not US citizens. Democrats have claimed noncitizen voting doesn’t happen. After multiple convictions of noncitizens for casting illegal ballots – some of them had voted in multiple elections – the narrative evolved from noncitizen voting “doesn’t happen” to “it doesn’t happen enough to make a difference,” which seems rather flippant, coming from those who claim to cherish democracy.
On Oct. 30, the three-judge 9th Circuit panel, in a 2-1 opinion, said the DOJ hadn't shown that extraordinary relief in the middle of an election was justified.
When the DOJ asked the Supreme Court to issue an injunction pending appeal, Obama-appointed Associate Justice Elena Kagan referred the request to the court, which denied it via an unsigned order with no explanation.
The Justice Department has had no luck pursuing potential noncitizen voters in several states, including Nevada and Washington. In the latter case, Washington’s secretary of state asserted that “many” of the 400 names of potentially ineligible voters provided by the DOJ were US citizens.
Whether it has a case or not, perhaps the DOJ should have picked this fight months ago, rather than just a couple of weeks before midterm elections. No one can credibly argue that noncitizen voting doesn’t happen. The convictions prove it does – but nobody seems able to ascertain the scale of the issue.
The California case isn’t over, though once the state’s deadline for accepting mail-in ballots expires on Nov. 10, it is going to be too late to separate out any ballots for further examination. What should concern any reasonable person who genuinely cares about election integrity is that the greatest and most powerful country in the world has – at least among developed countries – the most dysfunctional electoral system.
