Courts Block DOJ Election Actions in California

North Miami’s municipal elections have been thrown into legal turmoil by disputes over errors in candidate qualifying paperwork and fee checks: courts disqualified mayoral candidate Alix Desulme and council candidate Hector Medina, while a separate ruling affecting a council race was reversed. In Oklahoma, a Virginia legal nonprofit challenged a 2025 law restricting access to voter-registration records; in Utah, a federal judge ruled that the law cited by the Justice Department did not authorize access to the statewide voter database. In California, a federal appeals court rejected the DOJ’s bid to set aside ballots associated with roughly 20,000 voters it alleges may be noncitizens, and a federal judge temporarily barred the DOJ and Homeland Security from pressuring officials to segregate or reject ballots, remove voters from rolls, or threaten election workers. California officials dispute the federal voter list’s reliability, and ballot processing and counting will continue under existing procedures ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms. Separately, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to provide California’s voter list to an immigrant advocacy group and disclose which other states received similar demands; Orange County said it could not verify the citizenship of more than 1,700 voters under a separate DOJ request. A federal appeals court also struck down West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law as unconstitutional and dismissed a former officer’s case against people-search companies.