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Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a last-ditch effort from the Trump administration to require California to separate mail ballots received from thousands of people that it claims are not U.S. citizens.
The court said in a one-line, unsigned order that it was denying the Justice Department’s request for an injunction requiring election officials from California to set aside the ballots from 20,000 alleged noncitizens. There were no noted dissents.
The Supreme Court acted only on the Trump administration’s request for emergency relief and did not ask the California election officials to respond before ruling.
The Justice Department sought the Supreme Court’s intervention earlier in the day after a divided federal appeals court refused to order California election workers to set aside mail ballots cast by people on a government list of “likely” noncitizens.
A U.S. district judge, David Carter, last week rebuffed the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order that would’ve required ballots received from those on the list to be segregated and said the Trump administration’s process for identifying the alleged noncitizens was “rife with uncertainty and errors.”
The dispute over the ballots in California has played out in the closing days of the 2026 midterm campaign season as Republicans have been fighting to maintain their control of the House and Senate. Voting in the state has been underway since early October, and more than 6 million mail ballots have been returned to election offices across California.
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are significant numbers of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections, though confirmed instances of noncitizen voting are rare. It is a violation of federal law for people who are not citizens to vote in U.S. elections. The Justice Department has brought criminal charges against more than 200 individuals who prosecutors have alleged illegally voted in past elections.
The Trump administration told officials with the state and Los Angeles County last month that there were more than 20,000 suspected noncitizens on its voter rolls and ordered ballots received from those people to be set aside and not tabulated until their citizenship could be confirmed. It has since sent letters to officials in all of California’s 58 counties with lists of alleged noncitizens on their voter registration lists and demanded ballots from them be put to the side. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California.
But the state and local election officials raised concerns with the accuracy of the list and the potential that U.S. citizens could be disenfranchised if they complied with the federal government’s demand.
The Justice Department went on to file a lawsuit against California officials and Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder and county clerk, and sought a court order requiring the ballots to be segregated.
Neither the district court nor the 9th Circuit, however, agreed to the Justice Department’s request.
As Tuesday’s midterms have approached, the Trump administration has taken steps to intervene in the elections. Federal prosecutors sent a letter to Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and demanded he set aside mail ballots from more than 400 people they claimed are not U.S. citizens. But Hobbs said the government’s list of alleged noncitizens contained “many” people who actually are U.S. citizens.
The Justice Department also filed a lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from certifying the results of its Senate election if incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. But a judge tossed out the suit Sunday.
