Donald Trump’s administration appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday in its push to sideline thousands of disputed California mail ballots the day before the pivotal midterm elections.
The emergency appeal came after an appeals court rejected the request to set aside some 20,000 ballots from people the federal government suspects may not be citizens.
The federal government says those ballots should not be counted until the voters’ status can be verified. California officials say the list is highly unreliable and likely includes many people who are U.S. citizens.
The Republican Trump administration has prioritized identifying noncitizen voters this year, despite them being rare.
Let’s say that the rate of some cancer in the population is 1 in 400,000, and there’s a cheap and non-invasive screening test for this cancer that is pretty accurate. The screening test has a false positive rate of just 0.1%.
If you screen 10,000,000 regular people with the test, it might find around 25 who really have the cancer. But it will also flag 10,000 healthy people for additional testing that is more invasive, carries its own unwarranted medical risks, and imposes unnecessary costs. No medical board is going to recommend applying this screening test to the general population.
Anyhow, the original post was about voting.
