The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday evening, Nov. 2, 2026, denied the Trump administration’s emergency request to make California set aside the mail ballots of more than 20,000 people that federal officials call likely noncitizens. The one-line order in United States v. California, No. 26A624, gave no reasoning and listed no dissents. It came hours before the final day of voting in the midterm elections, leaving these California ballots to be processed under state rules.
The order reads in full that the application “presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied.” Justice Elena Kagan handles emergency matters from the Ninth Circuit. The court released the order to reporters shortly before 6 p.m. Eastern, SCOTUSblog reported, the same day Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the application.
What the administration had asked for
The Trump administration sought an order requiring California to segregate, not cancel, mail ballots from people on its list until their citizenship could be checked. “Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,” Sauer wrote. The government relied on 18 U.S.C. 611, which makes it a crime for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election, and argued that “any ballot cast by an alien is unlawful.”
According to the filing, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ran a public copy of California’s voter roll through Accurint, a commercial data platform, before investigators reviewed the remaining names by hand. The government delivered the list to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan on Oct. 13.
Lower courts had already refused
On Oct. 28, U.S. District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles denied the request. “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 their own Constitutional elections procedures,” Carter wrote, as quoted by CNBC. On Oct. 30, a Ninth Circuit panel refused emergency relief 2-1. Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez wrote that “there is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement,” citing the Purcell principle against changing election rules close to an election. Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented, calling the proposal a “modest remedy.”
Other rulings against the federal effort
The Supreme Court order was one of several setbacks for the administration around Election Day, NPR reported. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., found on Monday that federal attempts to impose new ballot-counting procedures were unconstitutional and blocked officials from trying to compel California to segregate ballots based on the Justice Department list. Late Monday night, a different D.C. federal judge barred the administration from sending lists of alleged noncitizen voters to election administrators anywhere in the country, finding the practice likely violates the Privacy Act.
In San Francisco, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order late on Oct. 30 barring the administration from threatening, intimidating or coercing election officials into stopping the processing of ballots from registered voters it alleges are ineligible. The government appealed, but the order remains in place while the full Ninth Circuit reviews it, according to NPR.
By the numbers: how big is the disputed list?
Data scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles Voting Rights Project, given access to the list through a court order in another lawsuit, found that 42% of its names do not appear on California’s current voter roll and that it includes naturalized citizens, NPR reported. County officials found many people on the list had no active registration and were not mailed ballots, so the number of ballots actually in dispute is likely much smaller than 20,000.
California had 23,273,590 registered voters at the 15-day close before the election, according to the Secretary of State’s Oct. 19 Report of Registration, up 1,333,316, or about 6.1%, from the same point in 2022, by TBR’s calculation. The full list of “more than 20,000” names equals about 0.09% of that total, by TBR’s calculation. Los Angeles County alone had 5,914,190 registered voters, according to the state’s county table.
What happens next in California
California counts mail ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive by Nov. 10, so processing continues this week. The denial covers only the emergency request; the underlying lawsuit, filed Oct. 15 in the Central District of California, has not been resolved. Attorney General Rob Bonta had called the Supreme Court filing an attempt “to undermine our elections and trample on the rule of law,” Reuters reported. The swift denial capped a string of losses for the administration’s effort to intervene before ballots were counted, the Associated Press reported.
No court order in the case affects Massachusetts. Bay State mail ballots returned from within the U.S. count if postmarked by Nov. 3 and received by 5 p.m. on Nov. 6; results and races are on our Massachusetts election tracker.
Sources
- Supreme Court of the United States: Order List, Nov. 2, 2026 (26A624, United States v. California)
- Supreme Court of the United States: Application for Injunction Pending Appeal, No. 26A624
- Supreme Court of the United States: Docket for 26A624
- California Secretary of State: Historical Voter Registration Statistics, Oct. 19, 2026
- California Secretary of State: Registration by County, Oct. 19, 2026
- U.S. Code: 18 U.S.C. 611, Voting by aliens
- Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Elections Advisory 26-12
- NPR: Supreme Court rejects DOJ push to separate California ballots
- SCOTUSblog: Court won’t intervene in California ballot dispute
- AP: Supreme Court rejects Trump administration push to set aside thousands of California ballots
- CNBC: DOJ asks Supreme Court to block California counting disputed mail-in ballots
- Reuters (via StreetInsider): Trump administration takes California ballot fight to Supreme Court
Additional sources
- California’s Oct. 20 opposition brief in the district court called the suit a “reckless political stunt.”
- Bonta’s office said after the district court ruling that the administration had admitted its list “could include several U.S. citizens.”
- SCOTUSblog’s report on the filing details Sauer’s request for an immediate administrative injunction.
- Axios covered the department’s appeal to the justices.
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