A majority of the Ninth Circuit’s en banc lifted a temporary restraining order that had blocked the Trump Justice Department from sending threatening letters to California election officials threatening them with prosecution for processing 20,000 ballots.
During a conversation on Substack Live, Allison Gill and I explained why the latest decision makes it a whiplash inducing 24 hours for California election workers.
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump DOJ’s attempt to force California officials to sequester the ballots based on discredited claims that they were sent to “likely” noncitizens. In theory, the ballots only would be set aside pending an investigation to confirm the citizenship of the recipients.
In practice, a judge found, the voters would have been disenfranchised because such an investigation couldn’t be completed on time.
But the Ninth Circuit’s en banc majority found that, while the government cannot compel state election authorities to sideline the ballots, officials could “request” that they do so on pain of prosecution.
Lead dissenting Judge Mary Murguia said that, in reality, the “request” was an attempt at impermissible intimidation over a prosecutorial legal theory that the same court rejected last week.
“I would deny Defendants’ emergency motion to stay because the district court properly attempted to put a stop to Defendants’ efforts to intimidate election workers into abandoning lawful state election procedures through spurious threats of prosecution,” Murguia wrote.
Read the full order here, and watch the video at the top of this newsletter.
