The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday evening, November 2 — the night before the midterm elections — denied the Justice Department's last-minute request to force California to set aside the mail ballots of more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal officials allege are likely noncitizens, NPR and Bloomberg Law reported. The court's refusal ends the emergency phase of an unprecedented federal attempt to intervene in how the nation's most populous state runs its election: California's counties will process and count mail ballots on Tuesday, November 3, under the state's normal procedures, with no segregation of the challenged ballots. The underlying lawsuit continues in federal court in Los Angeles, but no court — not the district judge, not the appeals court, and now not the Supreme Court — has agreed to hold a single challenged ballot out of the count while it proceeds.

Source: NPR, Nov 2, 2026

What the administration had asked for was sweeping. In an emergency application filed Monday morning by Solicitor General D. John Sauer (docketed as United States v. California, No. 26A624), the Justice Department wanted the justices to order California to separate any ballots cast by people on a Homeland Security list of 20,000 names and not count them until each voter's citizenship could be verified. “Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” the department argued. The department sued California on October 15 under a 1996 federal law that makes it a criminal offence for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, arguing that the state was unlawfully blocking federal enforcement and that federal law prevails over state election procedures under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, Reuters reported.

Source: Reuters, Nov 2, 2026

A decision delivered in hours, without explanation

The speed and silence of the refusal carried their own signal. The justices acted only hours after the administration filed, issued no explanation and noted no dissents, and — unusually — did not ask California to file a response first, the step the court normally takes when an emergency request looks like a close call, Bloomberg Law reported. Law.com likewise reported no dissents in the denial. The case had arrived at the high court after a run of lower-court losses for the administration in the same dispute: a federal district judge refused the same set-aside order on October 28, and a divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused it again on Friday, October 30. Monday's denial means all three levels of the federal judiciary declined, within five days, to disturb California's count on election eve.

How a July letter became an election-eve court fight

The dispute began months before it reached a courtroom. On July 16, the Department of Homeland Security wrote to California claiming more than 190,000 noncitizens might be registered to vote and asking the state to “work collaboratively” to verify them; about a week later, California's secretary of state expressed doubts about the data and asked DHS to explain its methodology, Bloomberg Law reported. The administration did not respond until October 13, when the Justice Department sent a revised, much smaller list of 20,000 people it called “likely” noncitizens who had been sent ballots — and sued two days later, on October 15, more than a week after mail ballots had already gone out to all of California's roughly 23 million registered voters. In the weeks since, the department has also sent subpoenas to California election officials and reminded officials they could face criminal prosecution over ineligible voting, NPR reported; a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday separately barred the administration from threatening or coercing election officials over the processing of registered voters' ballots, an order the government has appealed.

U.S. District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles, who denied the set-aside request on October 28, put the stakes in unusually blunt terms. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the executive branch,” Carter wrote, warning the order “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.” Carter questioned the reliability of the federal data, noting that people flagged as noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have repeatedly turned out to be naturalized U.S. citizens, and he has set an expedited hearing for November 13, with election results due to be certified by December 3. NPR reported that Carter described the administration's wider campaign as “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference by federal officials.”

The 9th Circuit's 2-1 refusal on Friday rested on similar ground. Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote that “there is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County's entire election,” citing Los Angeles County. The majority invoked the Purcell principle — the longstanding rule that courts should not alter election rules on the eve of an election — the Constitution's assignment of election administration to the states, California's “comprehensive statutory scheme” for election integrity, and the National Voter Registration Act's bar on systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election. Judge Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented.

The list itself: 42 percent of the names are not on the rolls

The factual fight underneath the legal one is about the list. County election officials have found that many of the 20,000 people named had no active registration and were never mailed a ballot, so the number of ballots actually in dispute is likely far smaller than 20,000, NPR and Reuters reported. Over the weekend, data scientists with UCLA's Voting Rights Project, given access to the list under a court order in a separate lawsuit, found that 42 percent of the names do not appear on California's current voter roll at all — and that the list includes naturalized U.S. citizens. California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office has called the federal list “highly suspect” and says the state's own safeguards against noncitizen voting are robust. The pattern has a precedent inside the administration's own campaign: Nevada officials examining a similar federal list sent to their state found it contained zero noncitizens, Bloomberg Law reported. Studies and state audits consistently find noncitizen voting in U.S. elections to be exceedingly rare, Reuters noted.

Both sides claimed the ruling's meaning within hours. “This latest move reeks of desperation, and is another attempt to undermine our elections and trample on the rule of law,” Attorney General Bonta said of the Supreme Court filing, vowing to “defend the fundamental right to vote and push back against this lawlessness.” Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter responded on social media: “We will continue pursuing every available legal avenue to protect the integrity of our elections and ensure federal law is enforced.” The Justice Department has sued some 30 states that refused to hand over voter data, losing most of those cases so far, and told election officials in all 50 states they could face prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to remain on the rolls — the broader campaign of which the California case is the centrepiece.

What happens next

For Tuesday's vote itself, the answer is now settled: California counts its ballots under its own rules, in an election that will help decide control of Congress — Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the House, where California's 52 seats are the largest bloc in the country, and four to take the Senate. More than 6 million mail ballots had already been returned statewide by Sunday, and results in close California races may take days as late-arriving mail ballots are processed. The legal fight is not over, only its emergency chapter: Judge Carter's expedited November 13 hearing in Los Angeles will test the reliability of the federal list itself, with certification due December 3, and the Justice Department's parallel voter-data lawsuits against other states continue. But the question the administration asked three courts to answer in the final week of the campaign — should 20,000 named voters' ballots be held out of the count on an unverified list — has now been answered the same way at every level: no.