The Justice Department’s campaign to separate roughly 20,000 California ballots tied to alleged noncitizens has been framed as either a necessary safeguard against illegal voting or an unprecedented threat to lawful voters and state election control. So far, the courts have sided with the latter concern.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s emergency request in a 2-1 ruling, echoing a district court’s earlier refusal to force California to hold the ballots for citizenship checks. The majority said the DOJ had not shown clear legal authority for overriding California’s election procedures and questioned whether federal data could reliably identify noncitizens. It warned that the requested remedy risked “the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy.”¹

The conservative case rests on a different risk: federal law bars noncitizens from voting, and once mail ballots are separated from identifying envelopes and mixed into the count, allegedly unlawful votes generally cannot be traced. Judge Patrick Bumatay, the dissenting Trump appointee, argued that segregation would preserve the opportunity to verify eligibility without canceling any vote. The administration has likewise maintained that counting noncitizen ballots would dilute citizens’ votes.¹

California and voting-rights groups counter that the government’s matching process is too error-prone, potentially sweeping in citizens—especially naturalized citizens—and that processed ballots are already anonymized. The appeals court called the proposed solution “simple only in the abstract,” warning that identifying individual ballots could produce “immense hardship” and threaten the public interest.³

A separate federal judge went further, ordering the DOJ to stop demanding ballot segregation and threatening election officials with prosecution. She found the conduct likely violated the Voting Rights Act’s ban on intimidation, writing that voting must be exercised “free from threat, fear, or intimidation.”² The rulings do not end the dispute: the DOJ can still seek Supreme Court intervention, while subpoenas and parallel lawsuits continue. But they sharply limit the administration’s ability to alter California’s count at the last moment.