WASHINGTON.- President Donald Trump's winning streak in election cases at the United States Supreme Court has screeched to a halt. It took the justices just six hours and 24 minutes on Monday to shut down the administration's attempt to intervene in California's ballot count on the eve of Tuesday's midterm elections, denying, in a brief one-sentence order with no explanation and no publicly noted dissents, a request to temporarily block the counting of mail-in ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal officials allege are likely non-U.S. citizens.
The speed and the silence were the message, legal experts told Reuters. The court did not even solicit a response from California to the administration's request, a step that, when taken, can signal the justices are treating a matter seriously. "But when a case is exceptionally weak, as DOJ's was regarding the California ballots, it's inevitable that a message is sent. Not even bothering to get a response shows how weak the filing was," said Ohio State University election law expert Edward Foley. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt was blunter, calling the California filing "hot garbage" and concluding that "the broader string of losses by Republicans, by the DOJ, is because their cases haven't been very good."
From landmark wins to "fly-by-night litigation"
The California rejection caps a run of recent setbacks that reversed a cycle in which Republicans had generally fared better than Democrats at the court on election matters. In September, the court refused to let the administration enforce a U.S. Postal Service rule to restrict voting by mail, a mode of casting ballots used more commonly by Democratic voters, with only the court's two most conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissenting. That same month, three decisions barred Missouri from using a redrawn map of U.S. House districts designed to favor Republicans, with the court warning that reinstating it "in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos."
That stands in sharp contrast to the court's earlier rulings this cycle, which had shaped the midterm battlefield: in April it gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, making it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory, and in June it threw out longstanding campaign finance limits in a challenge brought by Vice President JD Vance and others. Notre Dame professor Derek Muller drew the distinction for Reuters: the signature conservative cases were developed over decades, while the recent filings were made close to an election and were "half-baked or under-theorized" — "fly-by-night litigation that seems to be a regular loser."
California Attorney General Rob Bonta read the Monday order the same way. "I think the court is saying, 'We've had enough. You need to back off and bring to us cases that are worthy of us, worthy of the highest court in the land, and stop bringing the trash forward because it'll get dismissed just like this one,'" Bonta told Reuters, adding that the justices are not willing to tolerate baseless claims about election fraud. A Justice Department spokesperson on Tuesday expressed disappointment but said the effort continues, pointing to the 1,000 federal election monitors deployed across all 50 states. The administration's underlying claim rests on a Department of Homeland Security list of 20,000 registered voters alleged to be likely noncitizens — a list California says is rife with errors, and one lower courts questioned for reliability. Multiple studies and state audits show that ineligible voting, including by noncitizens, is rare. In a separate setback, a federal judge on Sunday dismissed the administration's lawsuit seeking to intervene in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska.
Read more on The Wire Post: Donald Trump Midterm Voting Hit by Westchester Machine Glitch as a Record 58.7 Million Americans Already Voted Early, Donald Trump Sends 1,000 Federal Election Monitors to All 50 States in the Largest Election Day Watch in U.S. History and Donald Trump Faces the Midterm Verdict as Final Polls Give Democrats a 9-Point Lead and Models Favor a House Flip.
Sources: Reuters, November 3, 2026. The California ruling itself was first reported on the eve of the election; this article covers Reuters' November 3 analysis of the court's halted winning streak and the expert reaction to it.