Trump admin drops lawsuit seeking to block 20,000 California ballots

The US Justice Department has asked a federal court to dismiss its lawsuit seeking to stop California from counting around 20,000 ballots it alleged were sent to noncitizens, saying the relief it sought was no longer possible. The motion, filed on Friday, came days after Republicans suffered losses in the midterm elections and ahead of a hearing scheduled for next week.

A special master was expected to examine the accuracy of the list used to identify the voters. California officials have disputed the list, saying it is outdated and includes eligible voters. The federal judge overseeing the case had also questioned the government's evidence while rejecting its request to keep the ballots separate.

In its filing, the Justice Department said the state would have already mixed the disputed ballots with lawful votes by the time of the hearing. “The relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available, rendering voluntary dismissal necessary,” the department said in its motion.

California election officials reported that about nine million ballots had been processed by early Friday, with nearly five million still awaiting counting. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, after ballots had been sent to all 23 million registered voters and hundreds of thousands had already been processed. Once processed, ballots are anonymised, making individual votes impossible to identify.

The Supreme Court rejected the department's emergency appeal on Monday, the day before Election Day. The government had asked the justices to require California to separate mail ballots received from the approximately 20,000 people whose citizenship it questioned. The court rejected the request in a one-line, unsigned order.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, had previously said the lawsuit could become irrelevant after Election Day because the ballots could no longer be separated. He said the department wanted to prevent potentially unlawful voting rather than investigate it afterwards. “We want to stop illegal voting. We don't want to chase it later,” Essayli said outside court the week before the election.

In a separate case, a federal judge dismissed the department's lawsuit seeking to block a Democrat's victory in Alaska's Senate race. The administration is appealing the decision but has yet to file its full brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.