Trump Administration drops ballot segregation lawsuit
LOS ANGELES (KESQ) - The Trump administration today moved to voluntarily drop its lawsuit against California, giving up on its bid to force election officials to stop counting thousands of mail ballots cast by voters it suspected with little evidence of being non-citizens.
The Justice Department's notice was filed in federal court in Los Angeles four days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the DOJ's emergency request to block officials from counting the disputed ballots. The dismissal signals the close of a legal battle a federal judge characterized as part of "a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference."
In the two-page filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Hamill wrote that "the United States exhausted its appeals to obtain timely relief all the way to Supreme Court."
Also, she wrote, by the time a previously scheduled court hearing on Nov. 13 would have taken place, "California will have already commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones. There is then no way to get the challenged ballots segregated. As a result, the relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available,'' rendering voluntary dismissal necessary.
The failure is seen as the biggest legal defeat for the Trump administration in its efforts to validate President Donald Trump's repeated claims that rigged elections allow Democrats to win.
The move to dismiss the case comes days after significant Republican losses in the midterm elections in which Democrats won historic victories to win control of both the U.S. House and Senate.
The federal government sued California on Oct. 15, more than a week after mail ballots were sent to all registered voters, demanding it set aside 20,000 ballots from alleged non-citizens after the state refused to voluntarily sequester those votes.
The effort was rejected four times -- twice by a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel and by a Los Angeles federal judge. Finally, the Supreme Court denied the appeal Monday, on the eve of Election Day, in a one-line, unsigned order.
In a forceful opinion, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter said the federal government's request "would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens."
The judge set an expedited hearing for Nov. 13 in Los Angeles federal court to further explore the accuracy of the government's list of what it claimed were 20,000 illegal voters. Carter said election officials have until Dec. 3 -- the date by which election results must be certified -- to resolve the issue, suggesting there was no need for an emergency injunction.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California referred questions to the DOJ media office in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday evening.
The Justice Department sued at least 30 states that refused to turn over voter data, losing almost all of the cases.
