9th Circuit Rejects Trump Appeal in CA Election Case

Following an usual Sunday afternoon oral argument, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected for now the Trump DOJ’s bid to interfere in California’s midterm election.

In a per curiam decision with two concurrences and one dissent, the appeals court panel rejected the Trump DOJ’s appeal as premature, which left the court without jurisdiction to consider it.

“[T]he United States failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider its application for a Temporary Restraining Order …” the court ruled. “For that reason, we lack jurisdiction over this appeal.”

The Trump DOJ was asking the appeals court to order Los Angeles County to begin immediately segregating the mail-in ballots of voters on a dubious list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens that the administration has compiled. Under the Trump administration scheme to disrupt election procedures and processes, those ballots would not be counted until the citizenship of those voters was verified. 

The per curiam opinion is a tidy 17 pages mostly on procedural grounds that had the support of Judges Mark J. Bennett (Trump) and Gabriel P. Sanchez (Biden). But a lengthy dissent from Judge Patrick J. Bumatay (Trump) on the merits of the case prompted a separate concurring opinion from Bennett. Sanchez also wrote his own concurrence.

While Bennett and Sanchez didn’t feel the need to reach the merits of the case, they each said in their concurrences that they would have ruled against the administration on the merits, too.

The case now bounces back to U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of Los Angeles who has a critical hearing already scheduled for tomorrow. 

Judge Carter’s failure last week to schedule the hearing within three business hours on a timetable requested by the Trump DOJ is what prompted it to race to the appeals court, arguing that the judge’s refusal to act more quickly amounted to a constructive denial. That put the Trump DOJ in the tough position of claiming that the appeals court had jurisdiction even though the lower court had not even taken up the case, let alone reached a decision. 

The appeals court faulted the administration for its initial lack of urgency in the case, a smackdown that may land Attorney General Todd Blanche in hot water with the Trump White House :

The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one. At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.

The Trump DOJ’s delays only compounded the existing problems with the relief it sought. Los Angeles County election officials argue that the Trump DOJ’s demands, coming at the last minute while voting is already underway, would be impossible to meet and still certify the election results on a pre-existing fixed schedule. They also point to the dubious list as unreliable and argue that the deadlines for challenging voter eligibility on this scale have long since passed. 

President Trump has made noncitizen voting the Big Lie of the 2026 election, in which Republicans are expected to lose the House and maybe the Senate, too. 

The Trump DOJ has followed his lead, launching a wave of new prosecutions of alleged noncitizen voting, including one undertaken in California in recent days that parallels its threats to election officials there and its lawsuit against Los Angeles County and the state.  

Regardless of how Judge Carter rules after tomorrow’s hearing, the case is likely to wind up back at the 9th Circuit, with the losing side expected to appeal.

The case has implications beyond Los Angeles County and possibly beyond California. The Trump DOJ late last week sent letters to election officials in every California county threatening them with criminal prosecution if they do not abide by the administration’s demand to segregate and not count the mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizens.