US justice department seeks to drop lawsuit over California ballots allegedly cast by non-citizens

The US Department of Justice on Friday moved to withdraw its lawsuit seeking to prevent California from counting around 20,000 ballots that it claimed may have been cast by non-citizens, pending verification of their immigration status.The lawsuit, filed in mid-October, was part of President Donald Trump's administration's wider push to increase federal oversight of state-run elections. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without providing evidence, that non-citizens are voting in large numbers. Available data, however, suggests that such instances are extremely rare.The decision came days after Republicans suffered significant setbacks in the midterm elections and roughly a week before a scheduled hearing to examine the reliability of the list of alleged non-citizen voters. A special master was due to assess the accuracy of the list, which California officials have described as outdated and containing eligible voters. The federal judge hearing the case had also criticised the list while rejecting the department's request, according to the Associated Press.The department's motion to dismiss the case said that California would have already irreversibly “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones” by the time the hearing takes place. The lawsuit was initiated after ballots had been dispatched to all 23 million registered voters in the state, with hundreds of thousands already processed. Once counted for processing, ballots are fully anonymised.California election officials said the state had processed around 9 million ballots by early Friday, while nearly 5 million were still awaiting counting.Despite seeking to end the case, the Justice Department said on Friday evening that it would continue pursuing suspected violations of election law through other legal proceedings. It is also facing lawsuits from several immigrant and voting rights organisations seeking to restrict its use of the list of suspected non-citizens.Separately, the department filed a motion backing another lawsuit, brought in May, which accuses California of failing to remove ineligible voters from its electoral rolls in accordance with federal voting laws.The move forms part of the administration's continuing efforts to “pursue every available civil and criminal remedy to ensure that only eligible American citizens vote in American elections,” top Los Angeles prosecutor Bill Essayli said, as per AP.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.