Attorney General Todd Blanche said on October 22 that the Justice Department could sue more states over their handling of the November 3 midterms, in cases like the one it brought against California a week earlier. "There's a number of states that we're looking at," Blanche told reporters at a press gaggle in Virginia. Asked whether anything would be filed before Election Day, he said he did not want "to get too ahead of the civil lawyers working on those cases." He did not name the states. In separate lawsuits seeking unredacted voter registration lists from 30 states and Washington, D.C., the department had lost every one decided in a federal district court as of August, by the count of Democracy Docket, a voting-rights news site founded by Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, and a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of its Michigan case in June. The department argues that federal law entitles it to the full, unredacted lists so it can check them for ineligible registrants, while states that refused have cited voters' privacy. Blanche has said most of those losses are on appeal and that taking the fight to the Supreme Court is a possibility, and the department dropped its Oklahoma suit after that state agreed to hand over its list.
The California case
The California suit, filed October 15 against the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan, asks a federal court to make election officials set aside mail ballots returned by more than 20,000 registered voters the federal government says are likely noncitizens, until their eligibility is checked. Its single legal claim is that California's refusal is overridden by 18 U.S.C. § 611, the federal law that makes it a crime for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election. "We're not asking California to take any drastic steps other than to sequester the ballots from the suspected noncitizens," Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, told Fox News, calling 20,000 "the floor." California answers that county election offices have neither the legal authority nor the access to federal records needed to verify anyone's citizenship, and that ballots cannot be pulled back out once they have been separated from their signed envelopes for counting. The state's lawyers called the suit one that "borders on the absurd" and "threatens to disenfranchise thousands" of voters. Los Angeles County alone had processed about 331,000 ballots by October 20.
How the list was built is itself in dispute. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to Weber that "there may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California"; Weber replied that she had "serious doubts about the reliability of your data." Government declarations filed in the case say Homeland Security Investigations received what appeared to be California's voter roster, that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services matched it against "a reliable third-party data analytics and investigative platform," and that further checks left "over 20,000 individuals." Asked at a hearing on Sunday who supplied the roster, the department's lawyer said the government "did not purchase the list, but the United States was supplied a list that was purchased originally from California," and that he did not have information on who the third parties were. Los Angeles County says it reviewed a sample of about 200 names from the list and found that 42.9 percent were canceled registrations and 71.2 percent had never voted. On October 19, the department announced charges against 28 people in California, alleging illegal voter registration; all 28 were green-card holders who appeared on the list, according to NPR's reporting. No court has yet ruled on whether anyone else on the list is a noncitizen.
Sharp questions on appeal
The case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before the trial judge had ruled. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who earlier dismissed the department's separate lawsuit for California's unredacted voter rolls, set a hearing for October 27. The department had asked him for a ruling by noon on October 22; when none came, it appealed the same day, arguing that his silence amounted to a denial, and asked the appeals court for emergency relief. A three-judge panel, made up of Mark Bennett and Patrick Bumatay, both appointed by President Trump, and Gabriel Sanchez, appointed by President Biden, heard arguments in a rare Sunday session on October 25.
Bennett called the situation "far, far, far different" from an earlier emergency case the department relied on, in which "people were about to be deported," and asked: "How can we, a federal court, do what is reserved to Congress, which Congress, in my view, hasn't done?" Bumatay pressed the state from the other direction: "If non-citizens are voting in California elections, that does seem like a harm." California's lawyer disputed "the factual premise that there are non-citizens voting." Seth Waxman, arguing for Los Angeles County, said Nevada had checked a similar federal list and found that everyone on it was a citizen; the department's lawyer replied that Nevada "just simply responded back that they relied on their attestation," meaning voters' own sworn statements of citizenship. The panel took the case under submission without ruling. Carter's order says he "will rule promptly" after hearing from the parties on Tuesday, October 27.
Alaska, certification, and a limit on field interviews
The department has also gone to court over certifying a result. In a suit filed in federal court in Alaska the same week, it asked a judge to bar the state from certifying its U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, and if votes cast for a second candidate on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher, would have given the senator the win had they gone to him under the state's ranked-choice count. A department spokesperson said Sullivan Jr.'s "candidacy was intended to mislead voters"; he denies trying to confuse anyone, and Alaska's Supreme Court ruled in June that he could stay on the ballot, which lists him as "Sullivan, Daniel J Jr." President Trump said of the suit, "I'm the one that said do it." Blanche said the department "does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska's election," only to preserve ballots so officials can determine whether voters were misled, and "I'm not trying to not have an election certified. Of course not." Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said "Alaskans don't need any help voting for their preferred candidates" and that the department "should never have filed this lawsuit." Derek Muller, an election-law professor at Notre Dame, called the legal argument "so absurdly thin" that there was "essentially no likelihood of success." Former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democrat running against Sullivan, called it "the corruption AK is fed up with."
Asked on October 22 about certification, Blanche said the department's intention is not to "improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process," but added: "to say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I'm not going to say that."
Separately, on October 21 a federal judge in California, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, issued a preliminary injunction barring the Department of Homeland Security, through Election Day, from conducting election-related field interviews in nine states (California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin) with people its agents know, suspect or reasonably should suspect are U.S. citizens. She found that the operations likely violate the Voting Rights Act's protections against voter intimidation, while saying it is not unlawful for federal officials to investigate illegal voting in federal elections, and she called the department's initial target list "voluminous and unreliable." She paused the order until October 23 to give the government time to respond.
This article reflects reporting through the evening of Sunday, October 25, 2026. Quotations from the Ninth Circuit argument are from an account based on a transcript of the hearing's audio. Sources: Democracy Docket, October 23; Ash Talks, "The 20,000 Ballots: DOJ v. California at the Ninth Circuit"; Fox News, October 23; NPR, October 22; Democracy Docket on the voter-roll cases; Votebeat, June 24; CBS News; on Alaska, NBC News, October 23, Al Jazeera, October 24, and CBS News.
