Justice department had demanded state segregate and not count ballots from people it claimed were non-citizens

A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.

The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

“This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election,” Carter wrote in his Wednesday evening ruling. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”