00:00The Trump administration's case against the state of California over the issue of non-citizen voting
00:04is continuing. And over the weekend, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit held an
00:09emergency hearing to allow each side to present its arguments. Remember, this began a few weeks
00:14ago when the U.S. Department of Justice gave California and several counties a flash drive
00:18that was password protected, and that includes the names of 20,000 people who are allegedly
00:23on California's voter rolls, but who are non-citizens and therefore not allowed to vote.
00:28So California and the counties didn't do anything with the thumb drive within 48 hours, so the
00:33DOJ sued them. The case was filed in a district court that was seen as friendly to the Trump
00:38administration, but then the case was reassigned to a more left-wing judge who said that he
00:43would hear arguments from the parties within eight days. The Trump administration said that's
00:46eight days too many. Ballots are already coming back. They're being counted. So they launched
00:50this emergency appeal. The three-judge panel included two Trump appointees and one Biden
00:55appointee, and they seemed somewhat skeptical of the DOJ's arguments, especially the rush.
01:00Why didn't you get this done earlier? There are also constitutional problems. One of them
01:04is that there's something called the Elections Clause, which gives the states the power to run
01:08their own elections. There's also the Tenth Amendment, which says that the federal government
01:11cannot commandeer state law enforcement to enforce federal laws. But the DOJ pointed out that it's
01:16also against the laws of the state of California for non-citizens to vote, and California just doesn't
01:21seem interested in enforcing that law. The judges asked the lawyers from the state of California to
01:26explain what California does if non-citizens tried to vote, and there was a lot of hemming and hawing
01:31and stuttering, and I don't really know. When someone comes to the polls and votes, how do you challenge
01:37them if they might be a non-citizen, and how is that evidence evaluated? And given that so many people
01:42return their votes by mail, how do you even know when a non-citizen is voting? California didn't really
01:47know how to answer these questions, and the judges seemed dissatisfied with that. It's not yet clear how this
01:51case will shake out, or whether it will go all the way to the Supreme Court, but one thing is
01:55clear.
01:55The only way to make sure that citizens are the only ones voting is through a voter ID law, such
02:00as
02:00Proposition 39, which is actually on the ballot on November 3rd. That's the only way to solve this
02:05process and keep this mess out of the courts.
