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Supreme Court Allows California to Count All Midterm Ballots · GNM News

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  Speaker 1: The United States Supreme Court has delivered a major legal
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  Speaker 1: ruling in the final hours of the midterm elections, formally
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  Speaker 1: denying an emergency application from the Department of Justice that
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  Speaker 1: sought to isolate and withhold more than 20,000 mail-in ballots
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  Speaker 1: in California. The high court's order issued without a written
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  Speaker 1: opinion or recorded dissents. leaving intact multiple lower federal court
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  Speaker 1: rulings that affirmed state sovereignty over election administration and ordered
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  Speaker 1: county registrars to include all validly submitted ballots in their
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  Speaker 1: final official tallies. The emergency petition brought before the justices
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  Speaker 1: represented the culmination of an escalating legal confrontation between federal
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  Speaker 1: law enforcement officials and California state authorities. Department of Justice
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  Speaker 1: attorneys argued that extraordinary federal intervention was necessary to compel
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  Speaker 1: local election administrators to segregate specific processing batches, contending that
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  Speaker 1: failure to remove flagged names from active voter lists before
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  Speaker 1: the conclusion of voting would cause irreparable harm to national
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  Speaker 1: election standards. Federal prosecutors asserted that administrative cross-referencing had identified
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  Speaker 1: thousands of potential non-citizen registrants whose ballots required immediate isolation
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  Speaker 1: prior to mechanical tabulation. However, state officials and voting rights
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  Speaker 1: advocates mounted a vigorous defense of existing election infrastructure, providing
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  Speaker 1: evidence to federal judges that the administration's claims relied on
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  Speaker 1: outdated immigration registry data. Documented audit findings revealed that a
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  Speaker 1: substantial majority of the individuals targeted by federal law enforcement
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  Speaker 1: were verified naturalized citizens, native-born Americans, or individuals who did
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  Speaker 1: not appear on active voter rolls. Counsel for the state
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  Speaker 1: emphasized that forcing county clerks to alter established processing protocols
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  Speaker 1: during live tabulation would introduce severe operational disruptions. create massive
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  Speaker 1: delays at polling sites, and risk widespread voter disenfranchisement. Lower
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  Speaker 1: federal court judges had previously issued sharp injunctions against the
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  Speaker 1: Department of Justice, ruling that late-stage administrative demands violated both
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  Speaker 1: the National Voter Registration Act and core constitutional principles delegating
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  Speaker 1: primary authority over federal elections directly to individual states. The
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  Speaker 1: Supreme Court's summary action officially exhausts federal legal remedies to
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  Speaker 1: halt processing protocols in the state, permitting local election workers
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  Speaker 1: across all 58 counties to proceed with the secure, orderly
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  Speaker 1: counting of millions of legitimate votes as polls close nationwide.