The 9th Circuit says no again: Trump loses a second bid to freeze 20,000 California ballots

The Friday ruling that kept 20,000 ballots in the count

On Friday, October 30, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the Trump administration's emergency request to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 mail ballots the Justice Department alleges were cast by likely noncitizens. The unsigned 2-1 order, issued in United States v. California (No. 26-7231) just four days before the November 3 midterm elections, keeps the disputed ballots inside the count under California's normal election procedures. It was the second time in less than a week that the San Francisco-based appeals court turned the department away; and the third straight court loss for the administration in a case that has become the sharpest legal test yet of how far Washington can reach into a state's ballot box on the eve of an election.

What the 2-1 split actually decided

The majority was formed by Judge Mark J. Bennett, appointed by Donald Trump in his first term, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, appointed by Joe Biden. They adopted the district court's finding that "there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system," and warned of "a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement." The majority wrote that "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," and declined "the United States's invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution's plain text." Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented, calling the administration's petition "a reasonable request," what he framed as "a modest remedy" for the prospect of illegal voting.

The timeline is compressed. The Justice Department sent California its list of roughly 20,000 "likely non-citizens" on October 12, barely three weeks before the election. It sued the state on October 15, about a week after mail ballots had gone out to every registered voter, demanding that ballots from the listed voters be separated and held uncounted until citizenship could be verified. An emergency request to the Ninth Circuit was rejected on October 26 on procedural grounds: the department had not given the lower court time to rule, and the claimed emergency was, in the court's words, at least partly "self-constructed." After a hearing on October 27 in Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied a temporary restraining order on October 28 in a 26-page ruling that said the request "violates longstanding constitutional principles" and would "wreak havoc" on the election. The department appealed again; and lost again on October 30, in a midterm season already roiled by ballot fights.

The 20,000 figure, crucially, is the department's claim, not a judicial finding. California told the courts the list is highly unreliable and likely includes many citizens, about one in four voters on it were born in the United States, the state said. The department itself has acknowledged that some of the flagged individuals may have since become naturalized citizens. Noncitizen voting is illegal in all 50 states, and multiple studies and state audits have found it vanishingly rare, but the administration insists the states are not doing enough to stop it.

The unknowns hiding inside the 20,000-name list

We do not know how many of the roughly 20,000 flagged voters actually cast a mail ballot; the Justice Department has never said. We do not know how the list was built, or what federal citizenship data California's own checks supposedly missed; every California voter attests to citizenship under penalty of perjury at registration, which is all federal election law requires. We do not know whether the underlying lawsuit survives the election: Friday's order denied only emergency relief, not the merits, and the case proceeds. And we do not know whether the administration will take the fight to the Supreme Court, where emergency appeals from the Ninth Circuit land with Justice Elena Kagan; though legal observers widely expect it to try.

Why 20,000 disputed ballots carry national weight

Because the case is no longer about California alone. The same department has asked Washington state not to count ballots from more than 400 residents it says may not be citizens, and it is suing Alaska over certification of a marquee Senate race. More than 100 federal subpoenas have gone out across at least 13 states in the hunt for alleged noncitizen voters. The Ninth Circuit's reasoning, that the Elections Clause leaves the mechanics of ballot challenges to the states unless Congress says otherwise, is now a written precedent the administration must climb over in every one of those fights. And the calendar does the rest: with four days to the midterms and Republicans fighting to hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, every ruling about which ballots count is also a ruling about the legitimacy of whatever result emerges on November 3; in a campaign already flooded with unprecedented money.

How a procedural win becomes a constitutional marker

The striking feature of Friday's order is who wrote it. Bennett is a Trump appointee; his concurrence in the earlier procedural ruling had already signaled he would deny the department on the merits if given the chance. When a judge the administration's own president elevated concludes that the request would "contravene the Elections Clause," the decision reads less like partisan judging and more like an institutional boundary being drawn. Carter's Wednesday ruling had already supplied the moral language; "never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon its own constitutional election procedures." The Ninth Circuit has now converted that language into appellate law, at least for the emergency posture.

The deeper dynamic is structural, and it is a pattern election officials now recognize across democracies: the department's list arrived three weeks before the election; its lawsuit landed after ballots were already in voters' hands. Courts at three levels have now treated that sequencing as dispositive, you cannot rebuild the machinery of vote-counting mid-flight without breaking it. That is a ruling about logistics as much as law. "No feasible way to segregate" is an engineer's sentence, not a philosopher's, and it will echo in Washington state, in Alaska, and wherever the next 48-hour deadline lands.

The subpoenas, the states, and the Supreme Court horizon

The second-order effects are already in motion. Federal prosecutors have issued more than 100 subpoenas to state and local election officials across at least 13 states, both Republican- and Democratic-leaning; an expansion the Justice Department frames as fraud prevention and voting-rights advocates frame as intimidation of the people who run elections. Washington state's top election official called the timing of the 400-voter letter an attempt to cast "unfounded suspicion" on results. In Alaska, the department asked a judge to block certification of the Senate race if the Republican incumbent loses narrowly, citing a same-name candidate on the ballot. Each front now carries the Ninth Circuit's fingerprint: segregation without a workable method is disenfranchisement by another name.

Four days to the midterms: what to watch

Three things. First, the Supreme Court: the department is expected to seek emergency relief, and the justices' handling of the Elections Clause question, or their refusal to touch it four days out, will set the tone for the post-election litigation wave. Second, the underlying lawsuit: Friday's order leaves the merits alive, and discovery on how the 20,000-name list was assembled could become the case's real battlefield. Third, the count itself: California keeps processing ballots under its own procedures, and the secretary of state's certification deadline in early December is the next hard date on the calendar. Until then, the ballots the department wanted frozen keep moving through the machines; counted, for now, like everyone else's.