Judge questions Trump purge of 20,000 California ballots

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter expressed doubt on Tuesday about the Trump administration's push to remove 20,000 ballots from California election records. Carter, a former Bill Clinton appointee, worried that the move could disenfranchise valid voters before the midterm election takes place.

The federal government filed suit earlier this month after California officials failed to meet a 48-hour deadline to set aside votes for individuals flagged as potential noncitizens. The administration threatened election staff with criminal charges if they allowed these voters to cast ballots. Carter indicated his ruling would likely order federal authorities to stop making those threats immediately.

Carter stated he would issue a formal decision by Wednesday but suggested appointing a special master to review evidence at a hearing scheduled two weeks from now. He explained he did not want to base a final ruling on last-minute evidence submitted by the federal government the night before the hearing. This timeline suggests a final decision might arrive after election day.

Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, defended the government's position. He argued that the list might contain citizens, but the risk of illegal voting by noncitizens was too high to ignore. Essayli questioned how many illegal votes the state would consider acceptable and asserted that states have no right to facilitate the counting of noncitizen votes.

State officials countered that the federal methodology for identifying noncitizens was flawed. Los Angeles County officials noted that a sample of 200 names from the list showed many were likely citizens who had not voted previously. Essayli responded that federal investigators re-reviewed the sample and found only four were citizens. He maintained the government stands by the reliability of its data.

The hearing followed a rejection by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of an emergency bid to bypass Carter's courtroom. Two judges on the panel ruled that the federal government's claimed urgency was partly self-constructed because prosecutors had raised these concerns since July. Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, wrote that Congress gave states, not the executive branch, authority over elections.

Carter pointed to recent actions by federal prosecutors who charged 28 California green card holders for allegedly voting in violation of noncitizen voting laws. He suggested that if noncitizens are voting in large numbers, prosecutors could simply indict them without blocking legal voters' ballots. Carter told the courtroom that if the issue is as big as the administration claims, there is already a remedy available through indictment.