Justice Department Drops Bid to Segregate About 20,000 California Mail Ballots After Court Setbacks

The U.S. Justice Department on Friday voluntarily dismissed its federal lawsuit seeking to force California to set aside and not count some mail ballots tied to roughly 20,000 people the government said were “highly likely to be noncitizens,” retreating after a string of court losses and days before a scheduled evidentiary hearing into the reliability of its voter list.

The notice of voluntary dismissal was filed Nov. 6 in United States v. State of California in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The case, No. 2:26-cv-12025, had been filed Oct. 15. In the filing, signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie A. Hamill and submitted under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A)(i), the department said “the relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available—rendering voluntary dismissal necessary because there is no longer Article III jurisdiction.” The filing pointed to the Supreme Court’s Nov. 2 denial of emergency relief, the passage of Election Day and the fact that by the time of the Nov. 13 hearing before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, the ballots at issue would already be commingled with others.

The dismissal ends a high-profile federal-state election fight in which the executive branch had asked courts to order California election officials to change ballot-counting procedures after voting was already underway.

Courts repeatedly refused. On Oct. 26, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the government’s first emergency appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Two days later, Carter denied the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order. On Oct. 30, the 9th Circuit denied the government’s emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal. On Nov. 2, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the government’s application for an injunction pending appeal in United States v. California, No. 26A624.

The legal record showed two recurring concerns: timing and reliability. Judges were skeptical of changing election procedures late in the process, and they pressed the government on the accuracy of the federal list used to identify suspected noncitizens.

In denying the temporary restraining order on Oct. 28, Carter wrote that the requested relief “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway.” That concern went to the practical effect of the order the government wanted: segregating ballots after voting had begun and preventing them from being counted while litigation continued.

Questions about the underlying data also shadowed the case. The federal push began after the Department of Homeland Security told California in July that a preliminary review suggested large numbers of noncitizens might be on the state’s voter rolls, a methodology California officials disputed. In a separate but related case in the Northern District of California, concerns about the list surfaced openly in court. According to Bloomberg Law and the San Francisco Chronicle, Judge Trina L. Thompson asked, “Would you agree there’s a high error rate?” and Justice Department lawyer Kenneth J. Kao replied, “That is a fair statement.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the dismissal Friday and cast it as an effort by the administration to avoid further examination of that list. “Next week, the Trump Administration would have faced tough questions in court about its list of suspected noncitizens. Rather than face that scrutiny, it chose to drop its case,” Bonta said in a statement.

The dismissal does not resolve broader disputes over voter-roll data or whether any specific person on the list was ineligible. It does, however, end this particular federal lawsuit without the Justice Department obtaining the order it sought to segregate and exclude the ballots.