DOJ dropped its California ballot case before its list faced an evidence hearing

The Justice Department voluntarily dismissed its California ballot-segregation lawsuit on November 6, four days after the Supreme Court denied emergency relief and one week before a scheduled evidentiary hearing. The department’s filing said California would have commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones by the hearing, leaving no way to obtain the segregation it sought and no remaining Article III jurisdiction.

The dismissal also ended the case before the government’s 20,000-name list received the scheduled public test. On October 28, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter found that the federal matching process supplied no error rates or validation against a reliable benchmark, left its data-enrichment method vague and did not adequately explain how an earlier claim involving roughly 190,000 names became a list of about 20,000. He concluded that the government had not made its ‘highly likely’ label credible enough to justify emergency relief.

DOJ filed the case October 15 after giving state and Los Angeles County officials about 48 hours to review the list and asking them to stop processing associated mail ballots until citizenship could be verified. The department described that request as targeted and modest. Carter found that implementing it during an election could remove ballots from eligible voters, disrupt tabulation and place the election at risk.

Los Angeles County’s preliminary review illustrates why the list needed testing. A declaration from county election official Aman Bhullar said a 200-record sample was 42.9% canceled registrations, 42.4% active and 4.6% inactive. It said 71.2% had never voted, and that 38.9% of records with meaningfully reported birthplace information indicated U.S. birth. Those fields did not themselves prove citizenship, and the sample did not establish the accuracy of the entire list.

The federal government disputed the county’s reading of that same sample. In an October 30 Ninth Circuit dissent, Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote that federal systems confirmed none of the sampled people were born in the United States and argued that California relied on voter attestations instead of federal immigration records. That conflict was material: it was precisely the kind of evidence dispute the November 13 hearing could have examined.

DOJ also had evidence that illegal registration and voting are real, not hypothetical. On November 2, prosecutors said they had charged 34 noncitizens in California and that every defendant’s name appeared on the 20,000-person list. A federal grand jury indicted 10 people on November 4. Those charges remain allegations, and they do not establish the list-wide error rate or show that 20,000 illegal ballots were cast in the 2026 election.

The government’s strongest legal argument was that ballot segregation would preserve disputed ballots without canceling them while citizenship was checked. A dissenting Ninth Circuit judge called that a reasonable and limited remedy and emphasized the public interest in preventing unlawful votes. The majority and the district court saw a different risk: imposing a last-minute federal process on a state election without sufficiently reliable evidence.

Timing sharpened that disagreement. Carter’s order said federal officials obtained California voter-roll data in May, raised an initial estimate of about 190,000 possible noncitizens in July and did not sue until October 15, after ballots had been mailed and processing had begun. The Ninth Circuit said the claimed emergency was at least partly created by the government’s own delay. DOJ then pursued district, appellate and Supreme Court relief before ending the case once segregation was no longer possible.

The accountability finding is not that noncitizen registration never occurs. The criminal cases show specific alleged violations that courts can test person by person. The problem is scale and remedy: DOJ used a disputed list to seek direct intervention in an active election without giving the court enough validation to trust its broad classification.

The dismissal leaves that list-wide question unresolved. DOJ says it will continue prosecutions and separate litigation over California voter-roll maintenance. But this case produced no ruling that all 20,000 names were citizens or noncitizens, and the government’s decision to end it means the scheduled hearing will not test the methodology it used to seek emergency control over those ballots.