Reviewed file photo — United States District Court for the District of Columbia / Wikimedia Commons, public domain (US federal court work). Unaltered James E. Boasberg portrait dated 6 July 2016; archival, not the November 2026 ruling.
Boasberg orders halt to federal demands to separate California ballots
The November 2 ruling addresses the administration’s pressure on election officials.
US District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration on November 2 to stop demanding that California election officials separate ballots cast by people on federal lists of suspected noncitizens, Reuters and the Associated Press reported.
Reuters said Boasberg found that the lists contained errors, including people wrongly identified as noncitizens. The judge said California could determine its own citizenship-verification procedures and that the executive branch lacked authority to impose its preferred approach.
AP reported that Boasberg’s decision concerned the Constitution’s allocation of authority over election rules to states and Congress. The ruling came ahead of the November 3 midterms and was separate from the Supreme Court’s rejection of the administration’s emergency ballot request. The photograph is a 2016 portrait of Boasberg.
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