Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). File photo of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, not a photo of Monday's ruling.
The US Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration's last-minute bid to force California to set aside mail ballots cast by about 20,000 registered voters the federal government alleges may not be US citizens, handing California a significant victory hours before Americans vote in midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.
The court denied the Justice Department's emergency request in a brief, one-sentence, unsigned order, as is common in urgent cases. It gave no reasoning, no justice publicly dissented, and — in a telling detail — it did not even ask California for a response brief before ruling, a step the court usually takes when it is giving serious consideration to an emergency appeal.
What the administration asked for
The Justice Department, in an emergency filing by Solicitor General D. John Sauer on Monday, asked the court to direct California to segregate any mailed ballots cast by people on a federal list of more than 20,000 registered voters who, in the government's view, are likely not US citizens, and not count them until their citizenship could be verified.
The administration had originally accused California of having 190,000 illegal voters on its rolls before revising the figure to about 20,000. It sued California in October, claiming the state was preventing enforcement of the law that makes it a criminal offence for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. California and Los Angeles County argued the federal list was unreliable and that building a new ballot-segregation system while voting was already under way was infeasible.
The dispute matters because of its timing. Tens of millions of voters had already cast early ballots nationwide, and an unknown number of the mail ballots in question had likely already been counted by the time the Supreme Court acted. A ruling for the administration would have injected fresh uncertainty into California's count on the eve of Election Day.
How the case reached the Supreme Court
Every court to consider the request before the Supreme Court had already rejected it. On October 28, US District Judge David Carter refused the Justice Department's request, writing: "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 election procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch."
On Friday, a divided panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals also refused the request, by a 2-1 vote. Judges Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel Sanchez, a Biden appointee, wrote that there was "a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County's entire election." They cited the longstanding Purcell principle, under which election rules should not be changed on the eve of an election, and the Constitution's grant of election authority to the states. Judge Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented, calling the government's request reasonable.
A federal judge in San Francisco also issued a temporary restraining order late on Friday barring the administration from threatening or coercing election officials to stop processing ballots of voters the government alleges are ineligible. The Justice Department then went directly to the Supreme Court on Monday, which shut the request down within hours.
Why the ruling matters beyond California
The decision is the latest in a series of election-law defeats for Trump at the Supreme Court. In September, the justices rejected his plan to change how mail ballots are sent to voters across the country, a proposal election officials warned would have had catastrophic consequences if applied to this year's midterms.
More broadly, the California case tested how far a president can go in directing how states run federal elections. The Constitution gives states and Congress, not the executive branch, responsibility for regulating federal elections, and the lower courts leaned heavily on that division of power. The Supreme Court's unsigned order does not explain its reasoning, so it does not settle the underlying legal questions — but as a practical matter, it leaves California's existing ballot procedures in place for Tuesday's vote.
It also undercuts, at least for this election, the administration's effort to cast doubt on the results before they are known. Trump has alleged, without evidence, that noncitizens are influencing outcomes by voting illegally, while voter-fraud cases are consistently found to be rare and not to affect election results. California officials have said many people on the federal list did not have active voter registrations and were not mailed ballots at all, meaning the actual number of ballots in dispute was likely much smaller than 20,000.
What happens on Election Day
With the Supreme Court's ruling, California will count its ballots under its existing procedures as voters decide all 435 House seats, about a third of Senate seats, and governorships in 36 states. The outcome will determine which party controls each chamber of Congress for the final two years of Trump's second term, and whether Democrats gain the power to constrain his agenda — including through a possible third impeachment effort Trump himself has warned about.
The underlying lawsuit over California's voter rolls is not over, and the administration could still pursue its claims through the ordinary courts after the election. But the emergency fight — the attempt to change the rules while ballots were already being cast — is over for this cycle, decided in a single sentence, on the eve of the vote, without a single noted dissent.
Sources: Reuters, November 3, 2026 (via Nikkei Asia and The Economic Times); Associated Press, November 2, 2026 (via WAMC and USA Today); CNN, November 2, 2026; USA Today, November 2, 2026. The Supreme Court order was unsigned and gave no reasoning; lower-court quotations are as reported by the cited outlets.