Absurd court farce on noncitizen ballots leaves Voter ID as the only cure

Voter ID is the only way to fix California’s broken election system.That’s the only reasonable conclusion from Sunday’s extraordinary hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.A three-judge panel heard the Trump administration’s case against non-citizen voting in California.The biggest news, opinion and culture shaping California right now.

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Never miss a story Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) gave California a thumb drive with 20,000 names on it, ostensibly containing the names of suspected non-citizens who had registered to vote in the state.State and county officials, who had already sent ballots out by mail, refused to open it.So the DOJ sued in district court, hoping to force California to set aside those 20,000 ballots if and when they came in. Time is of the essence: ballots are already being mailed back, and counted.And once they are in, it’s almost impossible to fish them out again.The district judge set a hearing date eight days after the case was filed.

Normally, that’s quick.But in the middle of a vote-by-mail election, it meant that hundreds of thousands of ballots would be counted in the interim.So the Trump administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit to intervene.The judges — two Trump appointees, one Biden appointee — seemed skeptical of the DOJ’s case, at first. After all, the Constitution’s Elections Clause leaves it to the states to decide how to run their election. Sure, federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting — as does state law in California — but normally it’s up to California to figure out how to enforce that.And if California decides not to make voters prove they are citizens — if it just asks them to “attest” that they are — that might be lame, but it might also be within California’s right to do so. The ...