Latest / GNN Daily Breaking News / US Supreme Court rejects Trump, lets California count all ballots
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: The United States Supreme Court has delivered a major legal
- 0:03Speaker 1: ruling in the final hours of the midterm elections, formally
- 0:07Speaker 1: denying an emergency application from the Department of Justice that
- 0:11Speaker 1: sought to isolate and withhold more than 20,000 mail-in ballots
- 0:15Speaker 1: in California. The high court's order issued without a written
- 0:19Speaker 1: opinion or recorded dissents. leaving intact multiple lower federal court
- 0:24Speaker 1: rulings that affirmed state sovereignty over election administration and ordered
- 0:28Speaker 1: county registrars to include all validly submitted ballots in their
- 0:32Speaker 1: final official tallies. The emergency petition brought before the justices
- 0:37Speaker 1: represented the culmination of an escalating legal confrontation between federal
- 0:42Speaker 1: law enforcement officials and California state authorities. Department of Justice
- 0:48Speaker 1: attorneys argued that extraordinary federal intervention was necessary to compel
- 0:53Speaker 1: local election administrators to segregate specific processing batches, contending that
- 0:59Speaker 1: failure to remove flagged names from active voter lists before
- 1:03Speaker 1: the conclusion of voting would cause irreparable harm to national
- 1:06Speaker 1: election standards. Federal prosecutors asserted that administrative cross-referencing had identified
- 1:12Speaker 1: thousands of potential non-citizen registrants whose ballots required immediate isolation
- 1:18Speaker 1: prior to mechanical tabulation. However, state officials and voting rights
- 1:23Speaker 1: advocates mounted a vigorous defense of existing election infrastructure, providing
- 1:28Speaker 1: evidence to federal judges that the administration's claims relied on
- 1:32Speaker 1: outdated immigration registry data. Documented audit findings revealed that a
- 1:37Speaker 1: substantial majority of the individuals targeted by federal law enforcement
- 1:41Speaker 1: were verified naturalized citizens, native-born Americans, or individuals who did
- 1:47Speaker 1: not appear on active voter rolls. Counsel for the state
- 1:51Speaker 1: emphasized that forcing county clerks to alter established processing protocols
- 1:56Speaker 1: during live tabulation would introduce severe operational disruptions. create massive
- 2:01Speaker 1: delays at polling sites, and risk widespread voter disenfranchisement. Lower
- 2:07Speaker 1: federal court judges had previously issued sharp injunctions against the
- 2:11Speaker 1: Department of Justice, ruling that late-stage administrative demands violated both
- 2:16Speaker 1: the National Voter Registration Act and core constitutional principles delegating
- 2:21Speaker 1: primary authority over federal elections directly to individual states. The
- 2:27Speaker 1: Supreme Court's summary action officially exhausts federal legal remedies to
- 2:31Speaker 1: halt processing protocols in the state, permitting local election workers
- 2:35Speaker 1: across all 58 counties to proceed with the secure, orderly
- 2:40Speaker 1: counting of millions of legitimate votes as polls close nationwide.