The ruling and Carter's reasoning

In the california ballots court ruling issued on Wednesday evening, judge David Carter refused to order California election officials to segregate and not count the ballots of people the Justice Department claimed were non-citizens. Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, put the stakes plainly in his written decision.

The judge set out several reasons in his written ruling:

• •Granting the request would likely violate a 1993 law requiring states to strike ineligible voters from their lists no later than 90 days before an election.
• •Segregating a ballot would, in effect, remove it, and he warned of the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, writing: "A ballot segregated, in effect, would be a ballot removed".
• •The allegations against the roughly 20,000 voters remain unproven, and he wrote that eroded trust in democracy is irreparable: "Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable. Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred".

How the dispute reached the court

The ruling followed by roughly a fortnight the Justice Department's handing of a USB drive to officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento, said to list 20,000 non-citizens on the state's voter rolls. California has more than 23 million registered voters, and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

The department gave officials 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if the ballots were not sequestered. It refused to provide details about its methodology, and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators the list was inaccurate. California election officials said they could not verify the citizenship of the people on the list before election day.

The dispute then moved through the courts:

• •The Justice Department sued California on 15 October to force the state to sequester ballots and verify citizenship.
• •After Carter set a 27 October hearing, the department appealed to the ninth circuit, saying he was not moving fast enough.
• •A panel of ninth circuit judges ruled 2-1 against the department earlier this week.

Sovereignty and the prosecution threat

Carter also rejected the department's framing of itself as a sole sovereign, writing that never before has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government into abandoning their constitutional election procedures. "But California and its people are sovereign, too," he wrote.

Separately, the Justice Department threatened to prosecute election officials in the state if they tabulate ballots from non-citizens. Sam Trepel, a former prosecutor at the justice department, wrote in a blogpost this month that such a prosecution would lack a legal basis.

After the lawsuit was filed, the administration sent lists of suspected non-citizen voters to other counties, where officials found the department had flagged voters who were not on the rolls and had provided insufficient information to verify status. Under the court order the department sought, California ballots will not be segregated.