With the November midterm elections less than three weeks away, the Trump administration is asking a federal court to prevent California from counting ballots belonging to approximately 20,000 registered voters it suspects may not be U.S. citizens.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit Thursday after giving California election officials just 48 hours to investigate a list of suspected noncitizens and separate their ballots from those of other voters.
There is one significant problem: The administration has not publicly established that the 20,000 people are actually ineligible to vote.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber's office says federal officials failed to provide sufficient evidence supporting their allegations.
Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the lawsuit, accusing California of potentially enabling voter fraud. The Justice Department maintains that preventing noncitizens from voting is necessary to protect election integrity.
But voting-rights experts warn that relying on questionable citizenship data could result in legitimate American voters having their ballots rejected.
The lawsuit follows another major legal setback for the administration. On October 9, a federal judge struck down the Justice Department's policy of collecting state voter rolls and checking them against federal immigration databases.
The judge concluded that the policy exceeded federal authority, violated legal protections and risked removing eligible American citizens from voter rolls.
Research has consistently found that noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare.
Now, with voting already underway, the administration is seeking judicial intervention that could affect thousands of ballots before their owners' eligibility has been established.
The central question is whether the federal government can justify withholding those votes with reliable evidence—or whether eligible Americans could lose their voices in an election because of inaccurate government records.