Lawsuit dismissed in California on counting illegal ballots

DOJ ends lawsuit aimed at sequestering California ballots tied to alleged noncitizens

The Justice Department dropped its bid to hold roughly 20,000 California ballots allegedly sent to noncitizens after the state mixed them with lawful votes, leaving no way to verify status before the count finished.

Federal prosecutors moved Friday to voluntarily dismiss the mid-October lawsuit that had sought to stop California from counting those ballots until immigration status could be checked. By then, state election officials said roughly 9 million ballots were already processed, with nearly 5 million still left.

NBC News reported that the Department of Justice told the court the relief it needed was gone. Once ballots are processed in California, they are completely anonymized. Officials said the challenged ballots would be irreparably mixed with lawful ones by the time of a scheduled hearing about a week later.

The motion put the core problem in plain language:

"The relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available, rendering voluntary dismissal necessary."

That filing closed a short, high-stakes fight over whether federal authorities could force the nation’s largest state to set aside suspected noncitizen ballots before they vanished into the larger pile. California had already mailed ballots to all 23 million registered voters when the suit was filed in mid-October, and hundreds of thousands were already being processed.

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