California election officials said the state had processed around 9 million ballots by early Friday, while nearly 5 million were still awaiting counting (Photo: Reuters).
The lawsuit, filed in mid-October, was part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s wider push to increase federal oversight of state-run elections. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without providing evidence, that non-citizens are voting in large numbers. Available data, however, suggests that such instances are extremely rare.
California election officials said the state had processed around 9 million ballots by early Friday, while nearly 5 million were still awaiting counting. It is also facing lawsuits from several immigrant and voting rights organisations seeking to restrict its use of the list of suspected non-citizens. Despite seeking to end the case, the Justice Department said on Friday evening that it would continue pursuing suspected violations of election law through other legal proceedings.
A special master was due to assess the accuracy of the list, which California officials have described as outdated and containing eligible voters.
The federal judge hearing the case had also criticised the list while rejecting the department’s request, according to the Associated Press. The decision came days after Republicans suffered significant setbacks in the midterm elections and roughly a week before a scheduled hearing to examine the reliability of the list of alleged non-citizen voters.
The department’s motion to dismiss the case said that California would have already irreversibly “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones” by the time the hearing takes place. The move forms part of the administration’s continuing efforts to “pursue every available civil and criminal remedy to ensure that only eligible American citizens vote in American elections,” top Los Angeles prosecutor Bill Essayli said, as per AP.