Bamm....

Judge says California doesn’t have to follow DOJ demands to segregate ballots

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has barred the Trump administration from demanding that California officials set aside ballots from up to 20,000 registered voters who federal agencies have deemed likely to be noncitizens.

“The Executive Branch has likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone,” Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote Monday. “California may decide for itself what procedures to use for verifying the citizenship of registered voters and for deciding whether to count their mail-in ballots.”

“Defendants’ flawed lists risk chilling or preventing lawful votes from being cast and counted,” Boasberg added.

Boasberg’s decision overlaps with a similar order issued by U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, a California-based Biden appointee, who barred the Justice Department on Friday from making demands of any state to separate ballots based on claims of purportedly ineligible voters. The Justice Department has appealed Thompson’s order and has asked her to put it on hold during that appeal.

During a hearing Monday in San Francisco on that request, Thompson sounded troubled by concessions from a Justice Department attorney that the lists being sent to voting officials aren’t completely accurate.

“It may not be a perfect list,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kao said.

“If I’m hearing that the list is flawed and it’s overinclusive and includes individuals who are eligible to vote, that’s a problem,” the judge said. “Would you agree there’s a high error rate?”

“I think that’s a fair statement,” Kao said, adding that federal officials hoped state and local authorities would check it against their own data to help ensure “the purity of the vote.”

Boasberg’s ruling came in litigation brought by a civic group that contended many of its members were likely on the Trump administration’s list in California. The Obama-appointed judge granted the group, the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights, access to the list, and a pair of data scientists tapped by the group concluded it included a significant number of erroneous names.