President Donald Trump speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A California judge will appoint a special master to investigate the process used by the Trump administration in developing a purported list of 20,000 “likely noncitizen” voters in the Golden State.
During a hearing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Bill Clinton appointee, expressed grave doubts about the government’s proposal to segregate or set aside the ballots of voters on that list.
“Some of these may be very valid voters, and that’s my concern about disenfranchisement,” the judge said, according to a courtroom report by CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization covering state politics.
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The judge’s decision dealt a blow to the U.S. Department of Justice. The government had asked the judge to issue emergency relief in the form of a temporary restraining order before Election Day.
On Tuesday, Carter said a formal ruling would be released sometime on Wednesday, but he suggested that a decision on the injunction requested by the DOJ would not come for some time. The judge said he would not “just wing it with a ruling” based on late-game evidence provided by the government on the eve of the hearing.
The special master’s work would also not be rushed, the judge said. That forthcoming court-appointed investigator would take stock of evidence provided by the parties in the litigation after a hearing scheduled to occur in two weeks, the court determined.
While the court’s decision — and the special master’s work — will not occur before the midterm elections are over, the independent inquiry into the methodology behind the list should be completed by Dec. 11, the deadline for California to certify election results, Carter said, according to a courtroom report by The Associated Press.
Speaking to his general skepticism of the government’s claims about the voter list, Carter described the DOJ’s proposed ballot segregation efforts as a “monumental change” to the way California administers its elections, according to a courtroom report by ABC News.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the DOJ simply wants to make sure California is in line with federal laws that bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli sketched out that position during Tuesday’s hearing.
“I would ask the state how many illegal votes is OK for them?” Essayli said. “It cannot be that the state has a right to facilitate the counting and tabulation of noncitizen votes. There’s no right to that.”
State and local officials, as well as voting advocates admitted as amici in the case, argued that the DOJ was attempting to encroach upon California’s constitutional and statutory rights to administer its own elections. The Trump administration’s preferred course of action also threatened to plunge the tabulation of ballots into chaos and could even disenfranchise lawful voters, California officials added.
“I just want to make sure the stakes are clear: that what we’re talking about is stripping voting rights from thousands of people until proven otherwise,” Anne Bellows, an attorney representing California, said.
The parties’ positions are starkly different.
In recent back-and-forth court filings, Los Angeles County officials said they surveyed 200 names on the government’s list and found that many were citizens who had never voted and were not sent ballots. The DOJ, in turn, said it reviewed 200 names and found only four citizens.
“We stand by the reliability of the information,” Essayli told the judge. “We take our obligations and ethics very seriously.”
But Carter was not convinced.
The judge suggested the government had better options than trying to force ballots not to be counted for the upcoming midterm election — if the problem was, in fact, as bad as the DOJ claimed.
“If it’s this big, you’ve got a remedy for goodness sakes,” Carter told Essayli. “Go out and indict.”
To which Essayli replied: “We want to stop the illegal voting. We don’t want to chase it later.”
As the hearing drew to a close, the judge offered another hint as to the kind of interim ruling that would be issued this week.
“This court believes it would be wise that any threats to state and county election employees cease immediately,” Carter said.
The post ‘Goodness sakes’: District judge highly skeptical of Trump admin claims about massive ‘likely noncitizen’ voting in California, will order special master to review evidence first appeared on Law & Crime.
