Hours after President Trump’s administration appealed to the Supreme Court in its push to sideline thousands of California mail ballots in the midterm elections, the justices rejected the idea. In a short, unsigned order issued Monday evening, the court did not specify its reasoning or note any dissents, the Washington Post reports. The administration had made the emergency filing earlier in the day after an appeals court rejected its request to set aside some 20,000 ballots from people the federal government suspects may not be citizens, per the AP.
The administration says those ballots should not be counted until the voters’ status can be verified. California officials say the list is highly unreliable and likely includes many people who are citizens. A district court judge forcefully denied the Justice Department’s request and warned that the demand could disenfranchise citizens in the Nov. 3 midterm elections to determine control of Congress. The Supreme Court appeared similarly unmoved.
Given that the court ruled within hours, and without eliciting a response or briefing from the two sides—as it nearly always does for emergency applications from the government—the decision seems to be “an extraordinary rebuke of the Trump administration,” per the New York Times. The Justice Department has been taking legal action to affect the way states run elections on Trump’s orders, per the Post, and the justices could have stepped in to help him but didn’t.
This file has been updated with the Supreme Court’s ruling.