For the second time in less than a week, a U.S. appeals court has rejected President Donald Trump’s administration’s petition to withhold 20,000 votes in California over concerns about non-referendum voting.
The decision was made Friday, less than four days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that President Trump’s request violates the U.S. Constitution and risks disenfranchising voters.
“The result of the United States’ request is not simply the sequestration of the ballot, but ultimately both its cancellation and removal from the voter rolls,” the majority wrote in its decision.
Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez, appointed by President Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, respectively, formed the majority.
A third judge, Patrick Bumatai, who was appointed by President Trump, issued a dissent, calling the administration’s petition a “reasonable request.”
The Trump administration sued the state on October 15 to stop the counting of those ballots, claiming that about 20,000 people received mail-in ballots to vote in California’s November 3 midterm elections.
But the accuracy of the Trump administration’s list has been questioned, as has the administration’s claims of widespread non-referendum voting.
Election fraud in the United States is extremely rare. President Trump claimed earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals were registered to vote nationwide, and the same is true for non-citizen voters.
Like California, states such as Nevada and Washington receive lists of alleged noncitizen voters, but state officials have found the documents to be largely inaccurate.
In Nevada, for example, state officials issued a statement in September saying the Trump administration had mistakenly identified citizens on the list as noncitizens. According to the statement, none of the names were correct.
California, a Democratic stronghold, will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives, one of the two chambers of Congress, on November 3.
The state has long been a target of criticism from President Trump, who has accused Democratic leaders of “rigging” the election.
But California officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, countered that the Trump administration was trying to interfere in the state’s election to sow distrust among voters and undermine the outcome.
“This is President Trump’s sad and desperate attempt to use the politicized Department of Justice to suppress California voters,” Newsom said in a news release after the lawsuit on Oct. 15.
Voting by noncitizens in federal elections is against the law in all 50 states of the United States, including California.
The Constitution’s Elections Clause also gives states exclusive authority to administer elections, but allows Congress to pass regulations regarding voting procedures.
The Trump administration first sent California a list of 20,000 “potentially noncitizens” on October 12, just three weeks before the midterm elections.
California officials rejected the administration’s request to withhold 20,000 ballots and asked for proof that the names on the list were indeed foreign nationals. According to the California government, no such evidence has been provided.
The Trump administration last week charged 28 foreign nationals in California with election-related violations, some of whom told the Los Angeles Times they had never registered to vote.
The newspaper reported that some of the non-citizen defendants had the same names as voters.
As the Oct. 15 lawsuit was heard in court earlier this month, the Trump administration asked the Ninth Circuit for an emergency ruling to block 20,000 votes.
But an appeals court on Monday rejected the motion, saying the Trump administration didn’t give lower courts enough time to consider the issue.
A lower court ultimately ruled against the Trump administration on Wednesday, and the administration appealed again to the Ninth Circuit.
In a majority decision, the appeals court determined that the Trump administration’s lawsuit was an attempt to violate the Constitution’s Elections Clause.
“We reject the United States’ invitation to violate the Elections Clause by undermining the plain text of the Constitution,” the majority wrote.
The majority also said it had “grave concerns” that granting the Trump administration’s request “risks voter disenfranchisement and harms the public interest by jeopardizing the entire counting process.”
