Judges SKEPTICAL of Tossing 20,000 Suspect Votes

Official election mail envelopes with county label — Photo: Anna Hoychuk / Shutterstock

When a federal agency builds a voter-fraud case on a list it cannot explain, the courtroom becomes less about citizenship law and more about epistemology — how do we know what we claim to know? That is the question now sitting before the Ninth Circuit, and the early answer, drawn from the government’s own list, is not reassuring to the Justice Department.

Key Points

The DOJ sued California claiming over 20,000 registered voters are “likely noncitizens” and asked courts to set aside their mail ballots before counting.
Los Angeles County’s own preliminary review found a large share of the sampled names belonged to people who appear to have been born in the United States.
A Ninth Circuit panel questioned the DOJ’s emergency posture, the list’s provenance, and why it bypassed the district court before a scheduled hearing.
Decades of academic and government audits — including a Brennan Center review and an MIT Election Lab audit of the USCIS SAVE system — have consistently found noncitizen voting to be exceptionally rare.
The case turns less on whether noncitizen voting is illegal, which nobody disputes, than on whether a probabilistic federal list justifies freezing ballots before individual verification.

What the Justice Department Actually Filed

In mid-October, the Justice Department sued California, announcing that it had worked with the Department of Homeland Security to identify more than 20,000 voters it described as “likely noncitizens” registered on the state’s rolls. The complaint, filed against Secretary of State Shirley Weber and county officials including Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan, did not ask for a wholesale halt to vote counting. Instead it sought a narrower remedy: segregate the mail ballots tied to the identified names and verify citizenship before those specific ballots are tabulated. The legal theory rests on the uncontroversial premise that only citizens may lawfully vote in a federal election — the fight is entirely about proof.

Where the List Falls Apart Under Scrutiny

That proof problem is the crux of the dispute. Secretary Weber responded in writing that the federal government had not produced evidence supporting the noncitizen designation for the names on its list. Los Angeles County went further, running its own preliminary sample and reporting that 38.9 percent of records with usable birthplace data indicated the person was born in the United States — a fact plainly inconsistent with noncitizen status. The same review found 71.2 percent of sampled names had no voting history at all, along with duplicate entries and registrations that were already canceled or inactive. Of the roughly 20,000 names nationwide, only 7,035 even carried a Los Angeles County address.

Attorney Seth Waxman, representing Registrar Logan, told the court the federal list was unreliable and that segregating the associated ballots “would effectively disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters”. That is not a vague objection to DOJ’s theory of the case; it is a documented, named, numbers-based rebuttal built from the government’s own list, cross-checked against county registration records. When the entity being asked to enforce a federal demand produces data showing the demand’s premise is flawed, that counter-evidence carries real weight — far more than the DOJ’s unexplained claim that its matching process identified these individuals as “likely” noncitizens.

The Ninth Circuit’s Skepticism, and Why Procedure Matters

Compounding the evidentiary weakness is the procedural path DOJ chose. Rather than wait for District Judge David O. Carter to rule on its temporary restraining order request, the department sought emergency intervention directly from the Ninth Circuit. That decision invited exactly the skepticism it received: reporting from the hearing described DOJ counsel struggling to explain how the roughly 20,000 names were flagged, what role an unnamed third-party vendor played in generating the list, and how the list’s underlying California voter data was obtained in the first place. Judges also pressed on the list’s age — reportedly close to a year old — and questioned why an emergency appellate posture was appropriate when the district court had already scheduled its own hearing days later.

None of this amounts to a final ruling on the merits. Courtroom questioning reflects what judges find unresolved, not what they have decided. But the pattern — an unexplained methodology, an undisclosed vendor, a stale data source, and a bypass of ordinary district-court review — is the kind of combination that tends to doom emergency relief, which courts generally reserve for claims resting on clear and immediate harm supported by solid evidence.

The Base Rate: What Decades of Audits Actually Show

This controversy does not arrive in a vacuum. Election researchers have examined claims of noncitizen voting repeatedly over the past two decades, and the pattern is remarkably consistent: apparent matches between voter rolls and citizenship databases almost always shrink dramatically — often to near zero — once individually verified. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented this across multiple jurisdictions, noting that identical names, outdated immigration records, and post-registration naturalization routinely generate false positives. A more recent MIT Election Lab audit of the federal SAVE database, built specifically to check citizenship status against voter files, examined more than two million records and confirmed just 27 noncitizens, with another 25 flagged as likely. That is not a rounding error away from 20,000; it is a different order of magnitude entirely, and it underscores why courts have historically treated large-scale citizenship-matching lists with considerable caution.

What Happens Next, and Why the Stakes Outlast This Case

Whatever the Ninth Circuit decides, the underlying tension will outlive this specific lawsuit. States have a legitimate interest in keeping noncitizens off the rolls, and the federal government has investigative tools — DHS records, USCIS databases — that states often lack. But those tools are only as trustworthy as the matching methodology behind them, and an emergency request to withhold ballots mid-election demands a far higher evidentiary bar than a routine roll-maintenance audit conducted months in advance. Future administrations of either party will face the same dilemma: speed versus accuracy, enforcement versus due process. How the Ninth Circuit resolves this case will likely shape how aggressively federal agencies attempt this maneuver again.

🚨 NEWS — CALIFORNIA — 9TH CIRCUIT QUESTIONS DOJ DEMAND TO SET ASIDE 20,000 MAIL BALLOTS

📂 Category: Elections / Federal Court
📅 Date: October 25, 2026 — Sunday hearing reported
📍 Location: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
🚨 Status: No ruling reported; case…

— WilluChill News. (@Will466513) October 26, 2026