Trump administration tried to halt counting of some 20,000 California votes; Supreme Court stepped in

The administration of President Donald Trump tried to stop the counting of ballots cast by about 20,000 voters in the US state of California. Claiming the voters were non-citizens, it moved to set their ballots aside and exclude them from the count, but the country's Supreme Court blocked the effort. The court said there were serious questions about the reliability of the list of suspected non-citizen voters, and that counting could not be halted without proof.

The decision came just hours before voting in the midterm elections. The details were reported on Wednesday (November 4) by the Indian news outlet NDTV.

According to the report, the US Department of Justice had demanded that the ballots of about 20,000 registered voters in California be set aside. The Trump administration wanted their votes left uncounted until their citizenship had been verified. It also warned that election officials who counted those votes could face lawsuits. Trump himself posted a warning on his Truth Social platform saying they would all have to go to prison for a long time.

In court, however, major questions arose over the reliability of the suspected non-citizen voter list. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had told California in July that the state's voter rolls might contain about 200,000 non-citizens. But the list sent in October contained only about 20,000 names.

Los Angeles County officials checked the records of 200 people from that list. They found that among those whose birthplace was recorded, 38.9 percent had been born in the United States. Another 112 people on the sample had cancelled or inactive voter registrations. Officials said the review itself made clear how unreliable the list was.

There had been big errors in such federal lists before. In Nevada, the federal government first named about 16,000 suspected non-citizen voters. After manual verification the number was cut to 185 — and in the end, all 185 turned out to be US citizens.

On October 28, a district court rejected the request to halt vote counting in California. Judge David Carter said such an instruction in the middle of an election could create chaos. He also remarked that if the executive branch tried to stop vote counting on the basis of unproven allegations, democracy would be threatened.

The Trump administration appealed, but a three-judge panel upheld the lower court's decision. Finally, on November 2, the Supreme Court took the same position.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration also carried out door-to-door operations in the name of identifying non-citizen voters. Under the Homeland Security department's 'Unlawful Voter Initiative', officials questioned residents in nine states about their citizenship and voting. The drive particularly targeted people who had become US citizens later in life rather than by birth.

On October 21, however, a district court ordered the operation suspended until voting in the election was over. The court said the United States has no central database for verifying residents' citizenship, so the process carried a risk of errors.

Arguing for voter citizenship verification, Trump has cited the examples of India and Brazil. Last August he also praised India's election system, naming its Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. In India, the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls dropped about 130 million names from the draft list. But India's Supreme Court has said that removal from the voter list does not mean the person concerned is a non-citizen.

India's Home Minister Amit Shah, meanwhile, claimed at a BJP event in Hyderabad on November 2 that about 30 million of the names removed through the SIR were infiltrators, including, he alleged, Bangladeshi infiltrators. In West Bengal too, about 2.7 million names were removed over logical inconsistencies; but many of those removed were later identified as genuine voters, and in more than 93 percent of the 126,000 applications decided by September 16, the people concerned were restored to the voter list.