A federal appeals court for the second time Friday denied a Trump administration request to block 20,000 ballots from California voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens — ruling that the administration had failed to show that “such extraordinary relief, during an ongoing election, is clearly required by law.”
The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — ruled 2-1 that the U.S. Constitution gives the state and Congress the power to decide how elections are run, and that allowing the Trump administration to “misuse” federal statutes to “prescribe” how California must process ballots would “override the plain and manifest dictates of the Constitution itself.”
“Because Congress has not exercised the specific power granted to it under the Elections Clause to override California’s established laws for challenging ballots or removing ineligible voters, the State Legislature’s statutory scheme remains the only method to do so,” the judges found.
The panel’s majority — comprised of Trump appointee Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel P. Sanchez — wrote that “if the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts.”
They also wrote that separate federal law prescribes sweeping changes to voter lists 90 days prior to an election, especially given questions about the reliability of the Trump administration’s list of purported noncitizens.
“The suspect reliability of these lists found by the district court reflects the concern Congress sought to mitigate with the 90-day quiet period,” they wrote.
Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee on the panel, dissented — arguing that his colleagues erred in denying a basic request by the Trump administration to ensure only citizens are voting.
“The federal government proposes a modest remedy — stopping California from mixing the ballots of citizens and suspected noncitizens,” Bumatay wrote. “This solution would not cancel any vote but would allow time to verify the eligibility of suspected noncitizens. The district court, and now our court, denies this reasonable request.”
This article will be updated.
