Court rejected Trump’s bid to block 20,000 ballots; Lietuvos Rytas reports Nevada’s 16,000 list collapsed to zero

Full analysis

What happened Why it matters How each country tells it Room for disagreement Our assessment Sources and evidence

What happened

The Supreme Court on Monday, November 2 — the day before the midterm elections — rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to set aside roughly 20,000 California mail-in ballots the Justice Department had flagged as belonging to likely noncitizens. The denial came in a one-sentence order with no stated reasoning and no publicly noted dissents; the Jerusalem Post timed the turnaround from the administration’s filing to rejection at six hours and 24 minutes. The Court did not even solicit California’s response before rejecting the request, an exceptional step that ANSA Brasil highlights and that Ohio State election law expert Edward Foley told the Jerusalem Post is taken only "when a case is exceptionally weak."

The administration had asked the Court to order California to segregate the challenged ballots until citizenship could be verified, calling the demand "modest." California officials said the list appeared to be filled with errors and that setting the ballots aside could effectively disenfranchise legal voters. Voting had been underway in the state since early October; California mails ballots to all of its roughly 23 million registered voters, and hundreds of thousands had already been processed. State officials said locating and setting aside the contested ballots at this stage would be logistically impossible.

A Los Angeles district court had already rejected the Justice Department’s demand. Judge David Carter on October 28 faulted the government’s methodology as "entachée d’incertitude et d’erreurs" — tainted with uncertainty and errors — and warned that segregating the ballots would "wreak havoc" on the midterm elections. "If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger," Carter wrote, according to the Associated Press. The AP adds that a 2-1 appeals panel upheld Carter, with one Trump-appointed judge and one Biden-appointed judge in the majority; the third, also a Trump appointee, dissented that California’s refusal to separate the ballots "encourages the violation of federal law." Lietuvos Rytas carries Carter saying the Justice Department’s actions reveal a "systematic and persistent attempt by federal officials to influence the election."

A separate federal ruling the same Monday added to the legal wall. Chief Judge James Boasberg in Washington barred the administration from ordering California election officials to isolate the contested ballots, writing that the Executive "likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone." The Constitution assigns election organization to Congress and the states, a point the AFP account carried by Dakaractu underscores.

The Justice Department’s own admissions have framed the quality of the list. At a hearing before District Judge Trina Thompson, DOJ attorney Kenneth Kao called a "high error rate" in the department’s data "a fair statement." Bill Essayli, the federal prosecutor running the Los Angeles office, insisted at a news conference that the people on the list were "not entitled to vote" — "This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a theory." — then, the AP reports, conceded there may be errors. The department itself admits the list "is not entirely reliable." The same day, Essayli announced six more cases under "Operation Protect the Vote," bringing the total to 34 federal prosecutions, all of those charged named on the 20,000 list.

The single most corrosive piece of evidence appears only in Lithuania’s Lietuvos Rytas. In neighboring Nevada, the administration began with a list of 16,000 suspected noncitizen voters; after verification, the figure shrank to 185, and then to zero. The AP’s account carries Kao’s "high error rate" admission but not the Nevada number. The Jerusalem Post carries legal academic Justin Levitt’s "hot garbage" assessment of the filing but not Nevada. The omission matters because Nevada is the administration’s own methodology checked against reality.

The administration’s week also saw a federal judge in Alaska on Sunday dismiss a lawsuit seeking to intervene in the U.S. Senate race, reported by both the Jerusalem Post and Lietuvos Rytas. A Justice Department spokesperson told the Jerusalem Post: "this is not the end of our efforts."

Why it matters

The 20,000 flagged ballots will now be counted in a midterm election that decides control of Congress for the last two years of Trump’s second term. The AP foregrounds the local fact — the ruling arrived "on the eve of the final day of voting" — and the consequence for California, the country’s largest state and a Democratic stronghold, is that every contested vote will be tallied.

The Jerusalem Post treats the ruling as the end of an expectation. The Court with a 6-3 conservative majority had delivered a string of Republican wins earlier in the cycle — gutting a Voting Rights Act provision in April, throwing out long-standing campaign finance limits in June — but has now refused the administration’s election-related interventions in consecutive recent weeks: a Postal Service mail-balloting rule in September, Missouri redistricting maps, now California. The academics it quotes unpack why. Levitt calls the filing "hot garbage." Notre Dame’s Derek Muller distinguishes the "signature litigation" conservative causes develop over decades from the "fly-by-night litigation that seems to be a regular loser before the court."

ANSA Brasil reads the episode as institutional resistance rather than partisan loss. It notes the Court rejected the request without soliciting California’s legal response, which the Brazilian service calls exceptional, and it cites a New York Times analysis interpreting the ruling as the Court not intervening to back presidential initiatives that alter how states administer elections.

Dakaractu’s AFP account makes the deadline itself the stake, carrying Carter’s warning in French that "notre démocratie est en jeu" — our democracy is at stake — and noting that Trump and Republicans regularly agitate the spectre of massive foreign voting that official statistics describe as extremely marginal.

Lietuvos Rytas frames it as a check on a president who never acknowledged his 2020 defeat and has claimed for months that the midterms will be rigged. The piece tallies the judiciary’s rejections — Carter, Boasberg, Alaska, Nevada — and reports the Nevada collapse from 16,000 to zero as its concrete exhibit.

How each country tells it

• 🇺🇸
  San Gabriel Valley Tribune · United States · wire copy

  The only home-country source, an AP wire under a Southern California masthead, reports the local fact: the Court refused to set aside roughly 20,000 Los Angeles-area mail ballots, so they will now be counted.
• 🇧🇷
  ANSA Brasil · Brazil · original reporting

  Makes the Supreme Court itself the acting subject, narrating an institutional rebuff in Washington delivered within hours of the midterms, with no dissents and no stated reasoning.
• 🇸🇳
  Dakaractu · Senegal · wire copy

  Times the ruling to the eve of the midterms and frames it as a setback inflicted on Trump, emphasizing that the conservative-majority Court offered no justification for its rejection.
• 🇱🇹
  Lietuvos Rytas · Lithuania · original reporting

  Makes the blow to Trump the story, foregrounding courts checking a president who has spent months claiming the midterms will be rigged.
• 🇮🇱
  The Jerusalem Post · Israel · original reporting

  Reports the denial as the collapse of an expectation — ‘Trump’s Supreme Court winning streak in election cases screeches to a halt’ — documenting the six-hour turnaround and what it ends.

Room for disagreement

The Department of Justice has not conceded the point. Its spokesperson’s statement carried by the Jerusalem Post — "this is not the end of our efforts. We are deploying election monitors… and will pursue other legal avenues" — describes a continuing operation, not a closed one. The 34 people charged in California are all on the 20,000 list, and the AP reports Essayli accused at least some of the six of having voted in multiple elections dating back to May 2020. The dissenting appellate judge argued on the record that California’s refusal to separate the ballots encourages the violation of federal law, a claim that at least some of the flagged ballots belong to genuine noncitizens. A one-sentence emergency denial carries no reasoning and binds no future court. And Muller’s distinction between "half-baked or under-theorized" recent cases and the long-contested litigation winning before the court suggests a more carefully assembled case could succeed in a different posture.