The U.S. Justice Department asked to dismiss its own lawsuit seeking to stop California from counting about 20,000 ballots it alleged involved noncitizen voters.
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The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday requested to dismiss its own lawsuit that sought to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged were cast by noncitizens until their immigration status could be verified.
The filing came days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was set to evaluate the accuracy of the government’s list of alleged noncitizens.
California officials have said the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters, and the federal judge overseeing the case echoed that view in an order denying the federal government’s request.
The motion to dismiss said the relief the federal government sought was no longer available because, by the time of the upcoming hearing, California would have irreparably “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones.” It also noted that once a ballot is processed, it is completely anonymized.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter appointed the special master in late October after allowing California to proceed with elections as planned, writing that separating ballots at that stage would risk disenfranchising citizens and warning it would “wreak havoc” on the midterm elections.
The DOJ said it would continue pursuing alleged election-law violations through other legal cases and also filed a motion in support of a separate lawsuit filed in May alleging California violates national voting laws by failing to sufficiently remove ineligible voters from its rolls.
Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement that “thousands of likely noncitizens remain on California’s voter rolls and voted in the 2026 elections,” and said California refused to cooperate with the federal request to set aside ballots.
The case was filed in mid-October, when ballots had been sent to all of California’s 23 million registered voters, after hundreds of thousands of ballots were already processed.
As of early Friday, California election officials reported it had processed about 9 million ballots, with nearly 5 million still left to be counted.
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