Supreme Court Declines to Block California Ballots on the Eve of the Midterms

On Monday 2 November, the US Supreme Court rejected the Justice Department’s emergency request to force California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots the administration said were cast by likely noncitizens.

The order was brief, one sentence, with no explanation and no publicly noted dissents. The court did not decide whether any voter was a noncitizen, and the underlying case continues. It was a refusal of interim relief, not a final judgment.

The administration had asked California to segregate the ballots until eligibility could be checked. Lower courts had already refused, with US District Judge David O. Carter describing the government’s matching process as “rife with uncertainty and errors”, according to court reporting. Filings cited in that reporting said about 8,880 of the 20,930 people flagged were not on California’s voter rolls at all, and that thousands of naturalized citizens had been misidentified.

The conservative take: Election integrity matters, and it has to be built on accurate lists. A challenge that sweeps up thousands of lawful citizens along with any real errors does not strengthen trust in elections, it weakens it. The right response is cleaner voter rolls and verification done well before Election Day, not a last-minute request to set ballots aside. The court was right to let California count its votes while the case goes on, and the administration should fix the data before it brings the next one.