Soon after a federal judge in Los Angeles sharply rejected a Trump administration effort to block 20,000 California ballots from voters it alleged may be noncitizens, the U.S. Justice Department announced it will appeal — leaving attorneys on both sides preparing Thursday for yet another court battle. That was despite the lower court judge calling the request an unlawful threat to eligible voters in Tuesday’s midterm election and to free and fair American elections moving forward, and the same appellate court having already rejected the same plan days prior.
This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution,” wrote First Assistant U.S. Bill Essayli, the lead prosecutor in L.A. Gavin Newsom swiped back at the Trump administration, writing, “A warning to Donald Trump: I’m deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts in California to protect every vote.
And I just made it a FELONY to illegally seize ballots.” With just days to go until polls close, the heated election war between California and the Trump administration is showing no signs of slowing down, despite multiple court orders rejecting the administration’s central effort to interfere in the midterms by accusing state and county officials of willfully turning a blind eye to voter fraud. That’s in part because lawyers within the U.S. Justice Department have been unrelenting in their pursuit of such control, both through court orders and threats to state and county officials.
It’s also because those same officials have refused to yield, denouncing the threats in recent letters back to the Justice Department as unconvincing and illegal. Blitch, counsel for Monterey County, wrote in one. Several elections experts warned the administration is trying to sow confusion and suspicion around an election in which the Republican Party is poised to lose ground, in part so they can reject the outcome.
But they also said the courts have consistently rebuffed the Trump administration, and will continue to do so through Nov. 3 and after — with the recent rulings in the case over the 20,000 flagged ballots a perfect example. It lost on the law, and it lost on the facts, and it lost on the equities — [or] weighing the harms to the various parties,” said Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law. Last week, Trump administration attorneys decided that U.S.
Carter was not ruling quickly enough on their emergency request for a temporary restraining order to block California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan from counting the 20,000 ballots it asserted were from “likely noncitizens” — so they appealed straight to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Monday, a three-judge panel there — including two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — denied the appeal for a lack of jurisdiction, because Carter hadn’t been given a chance to weigh in. However, two of the judges — Mark J.
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