Appeals court doubts Justice Department bid to set aside California mail ballots

A rare weekend hearing

A three-judge panel of a federal appeals court heard arguments on Sunday, 25 October, in a rare weekend session on a lawsuit the Justice Department brought against California. The department wants the court to order the state to set aside roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots that it says were sent to likely noncitizens. The government went to the appeals court before the federal court in California had decided the case, and the judges questioned that sequence. Circuit Judge Mark Bennett said the panel would issue its decision as soon as possible. Two of the three judges indicated they were uncomfortable with the intervention the administration has requested.

Bennett, a Trump appointee, put the central problem to Justice Department lawyer Matthew Donnelly. He pointed to the Elections Clause of the US Constitution, which lets states rather than the federal government run elections. Bennett argued that the request ran against state law, and he asked how the court could grant it.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law that the California legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause.”

The government's evidence

Donnelly told the court that the administration received a list of California voters from an unnamed third party, which had bought it from the state. He said the government then ran a rigorous comparison using third-party software, matching that voter data against its own citizenship records. Donnelly struggled to explain how the government had concluded that the flagged people were both noncitizens and had been sent a ballot. California's state officials, who are investigating the allegations, have cast doubt on the idea that thousands of ballots were mistakenly sent to ineligible voters, and they describe the data as outdated. The Justice Department says it does not plan to discard the ballots, only to keep them apart until it is established whether they were lawfully cast.

Bennett pressed the government on the reliability of its account, pointing to a sworn statement from an election systems worker in Los Angeles who warned that filtering out the flagged ballots would have a "catastrophic impact" on the election. He asked:

“You're asking us to take what you're saying as fact, as opposed to what the I.T. guy is saying, and with no fact finding by the district court?”

Los Angeles County has already processed more than 300,000 mail-in ballots in the count.

Midterm context and next steps

The complaint was filed on 15 October, less than three weeks before the midterm elections on 3 November. The lawsuit suggests that the federal government gave California officials a roster of 20,000 people it regards as ineligible on citizenship grounds. Trump has repeatedly pushed a claim described as discredited, that Democrats benefit from widespread voting by noncitizens. After right-wing candidates including Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt fell short of his expectations in the state's 2026 primaries, Trump denounced those primaries, and he then said the state would come under investigation by the US attorney's office.

Critics say the administration has also tried to delay vote counting in several states and moved to intervene in Alaska's Senate race, which they see as part of a broader effort to sway midterm results. The panel has not yet ruled, and the midterms on 3 November will decide which party controls Congress, as well as key state and local posts.