The Trump administration's justice department has been running a coordinated pressure campaign against local election officials across all 50 states, threatening criminal prosecution for anyone who fails to comply with federal demands on ballot handling. On Friday, US District Judge Trina Thompson issued a temporary restraining order barring the DoJ from threatening, coercing, or intimidating election workers — and from demanding officials segregate or refuse to count ballots the federal government claims were cast by noncitizens. The restraining order came one day after the DoJ sent letters to election officials in every state warning of prosecution and jail time for those who failed to preserve ballot records. Thompson's ruling was blunt: the department's actions "force election workers daily to choose between acceding to defendants' unlawful demands or adhering to their duties and thereby subjecting themselves to a serious risk of criminal investigation and prosecution." This is the second federal court ruling in a single day to reject the administration's election-control efforts. A Ninth Circuit panel, in a 2-1 decision authored by Trump appointee Judge Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, denied the DoJ's request to force California to segregate approximately 20,000 ballots flagged as potentially belonging to noncitizens. The panel warned that compliance could have "potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system" and that there is "no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals." The administration's own data is deeply unreliable. Two UCLA data scientists found that more than 40% of the ballots flagged by the Trump administration bear names not even found on California's voter rolls. Thousands of flagged voters correspond with confirmed US citizens. California officials have said the list is "highly unreliable." Elections officials have also noted that processed votes cannot be matched back to individual voters — making retroactive segregation technically impossible. The structural play here is unmistakable. The DoJ is attempting to use the threat of federal prosecution — not evidence of widespread fraud — to insert itself into the administration of state elections. Top federal prosecutor Bill Essayli's warning that "any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy" functions as a chilling mechanism, shifting the burden of proof onto local workers who face jail time for doing their jobs. The lawsuit was brought by labor unions and civil rights groups, not by state governments — a detail that matters. The judiciary is now the primary check on executive overreach into election administration. Both rulings are narrow and temporary, but they establish a pattern: courts are rejecting the premise that the federal executive can unilaterally override state election processes using prosecution threats and flawed data. Millions of Californians have already voted in the midterm election concluding Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of ballots have been processed. The question is no longer whether noncitizen voting is a real problem — data scientists and election officials agree it is exceedingly rare. The question is whether the federal government can use the specter of a marginal problem to claim control over the entire machinery of elections.
