For the second time in less than a week, an appeals court in the United States has rejected a petition from the administration of President Donald Trump to set aside 20,000 ballots in California over concerns about non-citizen voting. The decision arrived on Friday, with less than four days to go until the November 3 midterm elections. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s request would not only violate the US Constitution but also risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
Two judges — Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez — formed the majority. They were appointed by Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, respectively. A third judge, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, issued a dissent, calling the administration’s petition a “reasonable request”.
The Trump administration has claimed that nearly 20,000 “likely non-citizens” received mail-in ballots to vote in California’s midterm elections on November 3. It sued the state on October 15 to prevent those ballots from being counted. But the accuracy of the Trump administration’s list has been called into doubt, as have its claims of widespread non-citizen voting.
Election fraud in the US is extremely rare. So is non-citizen voting, despite Trump’s assertion earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals across the country were registered to cast a ballot. Like California, states like Nevada and Washington have also received lists of alleged non-citizen voters, but officials there have found the documents to be largely inaccurate.
In Nevada, for instance, state authorities ultimately issued a statement in September saying that the Trump administration had erroneously identified citizens as non-citizens on its list. Not a single name was correct, according to the statement. California is a Democratic stronghold, and on November 3, it will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives, one of Congress’s two chambers.
The state, however, has long been a target for criticism under Trump, who has accused its Democratic leadership of “cheating” in elections. But California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom, have countered that the Trump administration is seeking to meddle in the state’s elections to sow voter distrust and undermine the election results. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is against the law in all 50 US states, including California.
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