Supreme Court rejects Trump's request in California mail ballots dispute

The Trump administration has petitioned the US Supreme Court to compel California to separate mail-in ballots of over 20,000 individuals it suspects may not be American citizens from valid ballots. This request was made less than 24 hours before the pivotal midterm elections. The Department of Justice (DOJ) had previously dismissed the demand, with one judge labeling it as a brazen pre-election interference.

In an urgent filing with the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D John Sauer argued that mixing the contested ballots with legitimate ones precludes the recovery of the former. The only way to allow the district court to grant relief to the US after a thorough examination is to separate the challenged ballots now, Sauer stated. The California ballot dispute seems to be another move by the administration to cast suspicion on the results of the upcoming vote, in which President Donald Trump's Republican Party faces a potential loss of control over Congress.

President Trump, who did not recognize his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, has been alleging widespread fraud in the midterms for months. District Judge David Carter rejected the DOJ's request last week, standing by California's Democratic-led government. He emphasized that no such case has ever transpired in American history where the federal government pressured a state or local authority to disregard their constitutional election procedures and succumb to the executive branch's demands.

The DOJ has previously accused California of having 190,000 illegal voters on its records, later reducing the figure to 20,000 and subsequently filing an emergency lawsuit to prevent the state from issuing ballots to these individuals. A similar controversy emerged in neighboring Nevada, with the administration initially claiming 16,000 non-citizen voters, which later dwindled to 185 and then zero.

Research consistently demonstrates that while instances of voter fraud do occur, they are exceedingly rare and cannot sway election outcomes. In another high-profile election case, a federal judge in Alaska recently dismissed a Trump administration attempt to halt the certification of US Senate election results if the Democratic candidate wins, as another candidate named Dan Sullivan could have swiped votes from him.

Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Alaska, has refuted accusations of recruiting the second Sullivan into the race, but The New York Times reported that her campaign staff had connections with him.