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Trump's DOJ asks court to freeze 20,000 California ballots.

The DOJ's claim that 20,000 voters are noncitizens is unproven, and voting groups say the move may violate a D.C. judge's order.

Trump's DOJ asks court to freeze 20,000 California ballots.
Stock photo. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

The Justice Department went back to court Monday and asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to stop California from counting about 20,000 mail ballots while it checks whether the voters are citizens. The department claims they may be noncitizens, but it has not proven that. If the judge agrees, those ballots would sit in a pile during the final two weeks before the Nov. 3 election, and the burden would fall on the voters to prove they belong.

The emergency motion, filed Oct. 19 in United States v. California, No. 2:26-cv-12025 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, asks for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, Democracy Docket and Courthouse News reported. It would require state officials to set aside vote-by-mail ballots returned by people on a federal list and not count them until citizenship is verified. MyNewsLA reported that no hearing had been scheduled as of Monday.

The paper trail

The department sued California on Oct. 15, after Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan refused a 48-hour demand to review a thumb drive of names. The complaint claims the state is violating the Constitution's Supremacy Clause by counting ballots from people it was warned may be noncitizens. It leans on 18 U.S.C. § 611, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

In Monday's motion, the department claimed that "California not just refused to act," and that the 20,000 names represent "the floor of potential noncitizen California voters," according to Democracy Docket. Those are the government's claims. The government said this summer that California had as many as 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls, and the current list is about 0.08% of roughly 23.2 million registered voters, States Newsroom reported. Weber called the dispute "an emergency of the DOJ's creation," and Logan said his office cannot withhold ballots "based solely on unverified allegations," the Associated Press reported. The same day, the department announced charges against 28 California green card holders.

Meanwhile, in Washington

The California case is running into a ruling from 2,700 miles away. On Oct. 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia struck down the Civil Rights Division's program for collecting unredacted state voter rolls and sharing them with the Department of Homeland Security, in Common Cause v. Department of Justice, No. 1:26-cv-01352. "DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people," she wrote in her opinion. "The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the challenged policy under the Administrative Procedure Act."

On Oct. 15, Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, asked her for a status conference, writing that DOJ's Oct. 13 letters and the California complaint "appear to implicate—and perhaps outright violate" that order. Sooknanan ordered the department to respond by Monday, States Newsroom reported.

The department has already previewed its answer. In a motion to pause the ruling filed Oct. 16, alongside a notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit, DOJ argued that "DOJ does not believe the Court's vacatur order forecloses" the California suit. It claimed DHS bought California's publicly available voter roll and did not run it through the federal SAVE citizenship database. The motion also claimed the policy the judge struck down does not exist ("There is no such policy") and that her order "has hamstrung DOJ's ability to enforce the election laws." Our earlier reporting covers a separate lawsuit alleging DHS mixed voter files with data-broker records.

What comes next

Sooknanan has not ruled on the stay, set a hearing, or found a violation, and we found no action by the D.C. Circuit as of Monday night. In Los Angeles, the judge must decide whether to schedule a hearing on the restraining order, and whether to let two immigrant voting groups, the Immigrant Rights and Education Network and Mi Familia en Acción, join the case to defend the state. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has also argued that federal law bars states from systematically purging voters within 90 days of a federal election.

Federal law already makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote, and the department is prosecuting people it says did. Freezing 20,000 ballots on a list the state says it has never been allowed to check would punish eligible voters along with anyone who broke the law. We condemn the Justice Department's attempt to hold lawful ballots hostage two weeks before an election.

If you vote by mail in California, sign up for the Secretary of State's free Where's My Ballot? tracking so you know when your ballot is received and counted. If you are told at the polls that you are not registered, you can still cast a provisional ballot.

A provisional ballot is not automatically counted. Election officials first check whether you are eligible and registered, and the ballot is counted only if they confirm it. California law requires a free system that lets you find out whether your provisional ballot was counted and, if it wasn't, why. You can check through the Secretary of State's ballot status page, which links to your county elections office's website or phone line, or through the My Voter Status site. Ask the poll worker for any receipt or instructions when you vote, and keep them.

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