A federal judge in California has ordered the US Justice Department to stop threatening election workers with criminal charges over how they process ballots. US District Judge Trina Thompson of the Northern District of California issued the temporary restraining order late on Friday, the Guardian reported. The order also bars the department from demanding that local officials set aside or not count ballots that the administration says non-citizens may have cast.
Labour unions and civil rights groups brought the case. They accused the Justice Department of interfering with their duty to run the election. Thompson wrote that the department's "intimidation, threats, and attempts at coercion" forced election workers to choose between unlawful demands and their legal duties. Choosing their duties exposed them to the risk of criminal prosecution. She added that the actions were "likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters", the BBC reported.
The dispute centres on California. The administration says the state sent ballots to about 20,000 people who may not be US citizens. It wants those ballots held back until citizenship is checked. According to the BBC, armed Department of Homeland Security officials later delivered letters to county officials. The letters threatened charges if the officials did not set the ballots aside. California officials say the list is highly unreliable. Two data scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles found that more than 40% of the flagged ballots carry names not on the state's voter rolls, the Associated Press reported.
The order follows other court defeats for the administration. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the request to separate the disputed ballots in a 2-1 ruling. The panel said there was "no feasible way" to do so without potentially "catastrophic effects on the entire system". The Guardian also reported that the Justice Department had sent letters to election officials in all 50 states. The letters threatened to prosecute any official who failed to preserve ballot records. According to Thompson's order, the administration sent a similar demand to Washington state.
President Donald Trump criticised the ruling on Saturday. "Why would they reject fixing Election Fraud?" he wrote. He also vowed to keep fighting for "Election Integrity". A Justice Department statement said that federal law bans non-citizens from voting and that enforcing it "is the Department's job". Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, warned that officials who knowingly process a non-citizen's ballot face legal jeopardy.
Studies show that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. BBC Verify reported that the Heritage Foundation's database lists 24 convictions of non-citizens for voting between 2005 and 2025. Trump has offered a $1m reward for reports of voter fraud that lead to a conviction. Tuesday's midterms will decide which party controls Congress. Millions of Californians have already voted. Officials say processed ballots cannot be traced back to individual voters.