DOJ Appeal Reignites California Ballot Fight

Voters at polling booths in a gymnasium — Photo: Steve Sanchez Photos / Shutterstock

A federal appeals court just told the Trump administration to slow down after it tried to stop California from counting 20,000 mail ballots tied to voters it calls likely noncitizens, and the Justice Department is already fighting back with a new appeal.

Story Snapshot

The Justice Department claims more than 20,000 likely noncitizens are registered to vote in California.
A divided Ninth Circuit panel said the department moved too fast and sent the case back to the district court.
Los Angeles and Santa Cruz county reviews found many flagged names were U.S.-born, inactive, or never registered.
A federal judge in Los Angeles denied the emergency request, and the department filed an immediate appeal.

Justice Department Alleges Thousands of Noncitizen Voters

The Justice Department sued California on October 15, saying it worked with the Department of Homeland Security to find “more than 20,000 people who are likely aliens” registered to vote in the state. The lawsuit asked officials to set aside the ballots tied to those names before they were opened or counted, backed by two Homeland Security employee statements describing “highly likely evidence” of nonvoters on the list.

County Reviews Find Major Problems With the List

Los Angeles County checked 200 names from the federal list. Officials found that nearly 40% of records with usable birthplace data showed the person was born in the United States, which they called “strong evidence of citizenship.” They also found 71.2% of those records had no voting history at all, and 43% were already canceled registrations.

Santa Cruz County reported similar trouble. More than half of the 81 names it received were canceled or inactive records, and at least one name had never appeared in the county’s voter rolls at all. County officials publicly questioned whether the federal government even had the authority to demand ballots be set aside.

Reporting also detailed how Homeland Security delivered the list to the state: a thumb drive with the password written on a sticky note, paired with a 48-hour deadline for California to respond. That short window left little time for officials to check the names before the federal government asked courts to intervene.

Courts Push Back On the Emergency Request

A federal judge in Los Angeles denied the Justice Department’s request to set aside the ballots, warning that doing so “would wreak havoc” and disrupt an election already underway. The Justice Department filed an immediate appeal, arguing the delay amounted to the court effectively blocking its request without ever ruling on it.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the Justice Department’s emergency appeal, but did not decide whether the ballots were actually tied to noncitizens. The majority said the department had not given the district court enough time to weigh the request before rushing to the appeals court, calling the move premature rather than wrong on the facts.

A Dispute Over Scale and Proof

California has roughly 23 million registered voters, meaning the disputed 20,000 ballots make up a tiny fraction of the electorate even if every flagged name turned out to be accurate. Research on past noncitizen-voting claims has repeatedly found that database matches often catch U.S. citizens by mistake, since shared names, birthdates, or addresses do not prove two records describe the same person.

Officials with California’s Secretary of State’s office said the state cannot legally withhold or refuse to count ballots “based solely on unverified allegations”. County officials separately argued that once a mail ballot is opened and counted, it is physically separated from the envelope carrying the voter’s identifying information, making it impossible to pull specific ballots back out later for a citizenship check.

🚨 BREAKING: 🇺🇸 A federal judge has rejected the DOJ’s request to stop California from counting mail-in ballots linked to more than 20,000 people it alleges may be noncitizens.

⚖️ Judge David Carter warned that the government’s last-minute intervention could disenfranchise…

— Fact Checker (@FactCheckero1) October 29, 2026

The underlying fight is not over yet. The district court in Los Angeles is still weighing the broader lawsuit, and the Justice Department has signaled it intends to keep pressing the case through further appeals. For now, California continues counting ballots while both sides argue over whether the federal government’s list can be trusted.