‘We don’t think it’s that complicated’: DOJ says it’s simple for California to block 20,000 voters

The Department of Justice (DOJ) claims a legal doctrine that courts should avoid last-minute changes to election rules to avoid confusion isn’t relevant to its effort to bar California from counting the votes of 20,000 people on a list of alleged noncitizens. 

Why? Because it should be “simple” for the state to avoid counting the voters’ ballots, the department says.

In fact, an information technology expert in the state’s largest local election office said in a sworn affidavit that the impact of doing so could be “catastrophic” for administrators’ ability to count votes.

At a Sunday federal appeals court hearing in the case, all three judges on the weekend panel asked the Justice Department’s attorney, Matthew Donnelly, how DOJ’s request to segregate tens of thousands of ballots, while voting is already underway, would not cause confusion for election officials.

DOJ was asking an appeals court to issue an injunction against California even though a district court has not yet ruled and has set a hearing for Tuesday.

“Your Honor, we don’t think it’s that complicated,” Donnelly told the court. “We’re asking for an administrative, simple remedy of just segregating the ballots that we have identified as highly likely to be noncitizens.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has often cited the idea, known as the Purcell principle, that courts shouldn’t change election rules close to Election Day, to avoid creating confusion for voters and election administrators.

“Just last Thursday, the Supreme Court once again applied Purcell to stay an injunction that would have altered election rules on the eve of an election,” noted a lawyer for California, Sam Siegel. He was referring to a recent decision that paused a lower court order greenlighting the use of New Hampshire student IDs to prove identity. 

The High Court also used Purcell to shut down a Republican gerrymander in Missouri that ended with a triad of rulings giving credence to Purcell’s purpose and invalidating an Eighth Circuit decision.

And while not a Supreme Court case, a federal court in North Carolina also recently ruled that it could not block new GOP-championed absentee ballot rules because mail voting was already underway.

Donnelly tried arguing the California case is different, because it deals with “individual” voters. That argument is similar to the one used by DOJ, as it has sought to circumvent the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) prohibition on purging voter rolls 90 days before an election.

“Those [other cases] are about big system-wide things where voter maps are being challenged and, you know, put in at the last minute. Things like that. That is not what we’re doing here. We have given them an individualized targeted list of 20,000 names,” Donnelly said.

That assessment conflicted with one given by Aman Bhullar, who has worked in Information Technology for the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for nine years. Bhullar wrote in an affidavit that the impact of trying to segregate certain ballots could be “catastrophic.”

“The potential consequences of implementing DOJ’s demands are severe and range from halting all counting; halting in-person voters’ ability to cast votes; or otherwise interfering with the ability to accurately count votes,” Bhullar wrote.

Bhullar continued that it would, from his perspective, be technically impossible to implement what the DOJ has requested within the bounds of state and federal election deadlines. That’s because his department has no process for what the DOJ is asking, according to Bhullar.

A ruling from the appeals court is expected imminently.