The Justice Department said Thursday it will ask a federal appeals court to get involved in its bid to discard as many as 20,000 ballots sent to suspected noncitizens on California’s voter rolls.
DOJ said U.S. District Judge David O. Carter wasn’t acting fast enough, and with Election Day nearing, the federal government needed to see more speed.
“Given the critical and exigent nature of the relief sought, the court’s silence is a constructive denial of the United States’ emergency application for preliminary injunctive relief,” wrote Julie Hamill, First Assistant U.S. Attorney in California, in the appeal filing.
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DOJ filed the unprecedented lawsuit last week and asked for an emergency temporary restraining order on Wednesday.
President Trump’s team says it has identified some 20,000 names of potential noncitizens who are on California’s rolls and who, under the state’s all-mail election system, have already been mailed ballots.
The feds want California election officials to sequester any of those ballots that are sent back, preventing them from being counted until citizenship can be verified.
Los Angeles, one of the key jurisdictions targeted, said the U.S. is asking the impossible.
It said it has already mailed 5.9 million ballots and already processed 331,000 returned ballots. Those are anonymous and the county cannot determine who voted them.
“The county has no authority under state or federal law to withhold or set aside the ballot of a registered voter on the basis of a third party’s assertion that the voter may not be a citizen, nor to cancel a voter’s registration on that basis,” Los Angeles said in its court filing.
Officials said they are even limited in their ability to deactivate a voter from their rolls.
DOJ lawyers said those statements underscore the nature of the “emergency.”
“Every minute of processing that occurs without segregating the ballots of suspected non-eligible voters causes untraceable disenfranchisement and dilution of the votes of United States citizens,” Ms. Hamill wrote.
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