Reported by Al Jazeera
The 9th Circuit Court calls the petition to remove 20,000 ballots from California’s vote count unconstitutional.
For the second time in less than a week, a United States appeals court has rejected a petition from the administration of President Donald Trump to set aside 20,000 ballots in California over concerns about non-citizen voting.
The decision came down on Friday, with less than four days until the November 3 midterm elections.
More from the original report
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s request would violate the US Constitution and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
“The consequence of the United States’s request is not merely ballot segregation, but ultimately both the cancellation of the ballot and the removal of voters from the voting rolls,” the majority wrote in its ruling.
Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez – appointed by Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, respectively – formed the majority.
A third judge, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, issued a dissent, saying the administration’s petition was a “reasonable request”.
The Trump administration has claimed that nearly 20,000 “likely non-citizens” received mail-in ballots to vote in California’s midterm elections on November 3. It sued the state on October 15 to prevent those ballots from being counted.
But the accuracy of the Trump administration’s list has been called into doubt, as have its claims of widespread non-citizen voting.
Election fraud in the US is extremely rare. So is non-citizen voting, despite Trump’s assertion earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals across the country were registered to vote.
Like California, states such as Nevada and Washington have also received lists of alleged non-citizen voters, but officials there have found the documents largely inaccurate.
In Nevada, for instance, state authorities issued a statement in September saying the Trump administration had erroneously identified citizens as non-citizens on its list. Not a single name was correct, according to the statement.
California, a Democratic stronghold, will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives, one of Congress’s two chambers, on November 3.
The state has long been Trump’s target for criticism, with the president accusing its Democratic leadership of…