<p>Justice department had demanded state segregate ballots from people it claimed were non-citizens</p><p>A federal judge <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.1043513/gov.uscourts.cacd.1043513.149.0.pdf">declined to order</a> California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.</p><p>The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/15/justice-department-sues-california-midterms">comes about two weeks</a> after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-vanishingly-rare">extremely rare</a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/28/federal-judge-trump-california-ballots">Continue reading...</a>