The Trump Justice Department is going to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals with an emergency request to stop California from counting mail-in ballots connected to more than 20,000 suspected noncitizens. First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli and Attorney General Todd Blanche are leading the charge, and they want a ruling by Saturday, October 24.
“Every minute that goes by, American citizen votes are being diluted in the state of California,” Essayli said Thursday. “It’s an emergency, and we expect the courts to treat it as such.” Hard to argue with that. Unless, of course, you’re California, in which case you oppose the whole thing and hope nobody notices.
The DOJ says it identified over 20,000 people who are registered to vote in California, received mail-in ballots, and are considered highly likely to be noncitizens. Federal law makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and the government says some people have already been criminally charged over alleged illegal registration and voting. Essayli told Fox News the 20,000 figure is “the floor,” meaning the real number could be even higher. Fantastic.
The urgency here is real. noncitizen voter ballot dispute Los Angeles County alone has already processed more than 331,000 mail-in ballots. Once election workers separate ballots from their envelopes, identifying which ballot came from which voter becomes essentially impossible. At that point, any ineligible votes get permanently mixed into the count with no way to pull them back out. That’s exactly why the DOJ is asking for the ballots to be segregated and citizenship verified before tabulation, not after.
The motion names California, Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean C. Logan as defendants. California and Weber are opposing the request, which is about as surprising as the sun rising in the east. Gov. Gavin Newsom, never one to miss a chance to sound reasonable while doing something questionable, said California follows applicable federal election laws. Sure it does, Gavin.
The appeal to the 9th Circuit came after US District Judge David O. Carter simply failed to rule on the administration’s emergency request by its deadline. The DOJ argues that sitting on the motion without ruling is the same as denying it, and they’re not wrong. When the clock is ticking and ballots are being processed by the hundreds of thousands, “we’ll get to it eventually” isn’t good enough.
The 9th Circuit now has the ball. If the court doesn’t act fast, the disputed ballots could be counted and folded into the final tally before anyone can do a thing about it. That’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. The DOJ is betting the court treats this as the emergency it plainly is, because once those ballots are mixed in, the only people celebrating will be the ones who never should have been voting in the first place.
