The Justice Department has asked a federal court to dismiss its lawsuit seeking to prevent California from counting about 20,000 ballots it alleged were cast by noncitizens. The motion said the ballots would be mixed with lawful ballots before a scheduled hearing, leaving the government without the remedy it had sought.
The request, filed Friday, November 6, came after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the department’s emergency bid to require California to separate the disputed mail ballots. The court turned down that appeal in an unsigned order on November 2, according to CBS News.
The motion does not mean the judge has dismissed the case. The department argued that the requested relief was no longer available and said voluntary dismissal was therefore necessary.
California challenged the government’s voter list
State officials have said the list used to identify the roughly 20,000 voters was outdated and included eligible voters. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had earlier declined to require the state to separate the ballots, warning that doing so late in the election process could disenfranchise citizens and disrupt the midterms.
Carter appointed a special master to assess the list’s accuracy and whether California had a way to isolate the ballots. The hearing was scheduled for the week after the dismissal request.
By early Friday, California had processed roughly 9 million ballots, with nearly 5 million still to be counted, state election officials said. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, after ballots had been sent to the state’s 23 million registered voters and hundreds of thousands had already been processed. Once processed, ballots are anonymized.
The case was part of the Trump administration’s effort to challenge state election procedures. The government’s claim that the ballots belonged to noncitizens remained an allegation; California disputed the accuracy of the underlying list.
Nicole French 
Reid Bentley