Court Rejects Latest Trump Effort to Impound California Ballots

The lawsuit has become part of an escalating effort by the administration in recent weeks to sow doubts about the integrity of the voting process heading into the midterm elections, amid voter discontent and President Trump’s sagging approval ratings. The administration could now ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

Mr. Trump will travel to Kansas and Iowa to hold campaign rallies on Sunday, a White House official said, a sharp reversal after the rallies were canceled a day earlier in the two traditionally Republican states, where polls indicate tight races. On Friday, he said that he had wanted to test out tele-rallies in those two states but had received calls from Republicans in both saying that an in-person visit would be better.

It was the latest turn in the final days of a deeply contentious midterm campaign, with Republican candidates struggling to maintain their edge in a series of red states ahead of voting on Tuesday, and the Trump administration turning to the courts in search of a structural advantage.

The Justice Department widened its investigations into the election in California, issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in an expansion of its effort to prove unsubstantiated claims that thousands of noncitizens are on the state’s voter rolls. The union representing California election workers filed suit over the subpoenas, accusing the Justice Department of “unprecedented and unlawful threats” that “risk interfering with the lawful administration of the ongoing 2026 midterm elections and the counting of ballots.”

And in Alaska, the Justice Department on Thursday issued dozens of subpoenas linked to a Democratic plan to stack the ballot in a close Senate that could help determine control of the chamber. The Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, said late Thursday that she had not known about the effort.

The New York Times reported this week that Democratic operatives aligned with Ms. Peltola’s campaign had aimed to recruit candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan S. Sullivan, her Republican opponent. At a fund-raiser in Juneau, Alaska, on Thursday night, Ms. Peltola said, “I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters.”

Ms. Peltola’s comments contradicted the account of her former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, who told The Times that the candidate had not been directly part of the ballot-packing effort but that she was “definitely aware.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Democrats’ push: Prominent Democrats are fanning out on behalf of the party’s candidates. Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to appear in Tupelo, Miss., on Friday for the Senate candidate Scott Colom. Former Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver the keynote address at a fund-raising dinner for Democrats in Fulton County, Ga.

• South Carolina: The race between Senator Darline Graham, the Republican, and Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic challenger, is effectively tied. Republicans are grappling with the possibility that they might lose the seat, a prospect that seemed unthinkable only months ago. Read more ›

• Inflation and affordability: The fate of the G.O.P.’s control of Congress may hinge on the depth of voters’ fury over the rising cost of living — and Mr. Trump’s unmet promises to do something about it. Read more ›

• Michigan campaign: Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan had said that she would campaign this weekend with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee and her former primary rival. But less than 24 hours later, she said in a statement that she expected him to apologize for some of his comments about Israel. Read more ›

Mr. Heyman said the inquiry kicked into high gear after The New York Times reported that aides to Mary Peltola, Mr. Sullivan’s Democratic opponent, helped enlist the other candidate, Dan J. Sullivan. But he declined to say what crimes — if any — were being investigated.

“You’re assuming that there is a crime being committed,” he told a reporter who asked what the wrongdoing in question was, adding: “I’m not going to go into the details about what specific crimes we’re investigating.”

Democrats and former officials have accused the department of pursuing a political goal in the guise of a legal one: to publicize a scheme, sordid but not illegal under state law, to energize Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections.

Mr. Heyman said his office was acting in good faith to protect the integrity of the election.

He added that he was working closely with the F.B.I. in the state and around the country. But he struggled to explain why the report by The Times appears to have resulted in the expansion of the investigation, or why he made the announcement days before a hotly disputed election.

“When credible information comes out, we are committed to pursuing that information,” he said.

It is unclear what jurisdiction federal prosecutors have in the Alaska case, although officials in Washington have suggested it could be predicated on the existence of an as-yet-unspecified criminal conspiracy.

Karen Loeffler, a veteran prosecutor who served as Alaska’s U.S. attorney from 2009 to 2017, questioned the value of a criminal investigation. “There is no crime here that I can see,” she said.

“It may be somewhat underhanded. It may bother some people. But recruiting people you think will take votes away from somebody isn’t even unusual,” she added. “Nobody is going to be confused by this ballot. It makes very clear that there is incumbent senator Dan Sullivan and this other guy.”

Last week, the Trump administration asked a federal court to block the certification of the election in Alaska if Mr. Sullivan narrowly lost, the first time the Justice Department had sought to preemptively intervene in an election since the late 1960s.

In filings Friday, administration lawyers sought to force election workers to “preserve and segregate all ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan” in case of a future investigation. It is not clear how or if the state elections division would do that.

President Trump made clear last week that he had personally demanded the lawsuit. “I’m the one that said do it,” he told reporters as he landed in Florida for a campaign rally.

Judge Sharon L. Gleason of U.S. District Court in Alaska, who is presiding in the case, is considering a motion from Ms. Peltola’s campaign, national Democrats and the state elections office, which is overseen by Alaska’s Republican lieutenant governor, to dismiss the suit. She could rule as early as this weekend.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, a Republican, has demanded a criminal investigation, and has suggested he may try to block certification of election results, even as state lawyers fight the civil suit. His tenure ends Dec. 7, so a protracted legal fight could leave the future of any state involvement to the next governor.

On Friday, before Mr. Heyman appeared before reporters, the Trump administration appeared to soften its legal stance, shifting from a focus on potentially blocking certification of a potential Peltola victory to the request that elections officials “preserve and segregate all ballots.”

The administration did not indicate how it would conduct an investigation of anonymous ballots.

“If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts,” the order said.

The ruling just days before the midterm elections means that the window is rapidly closing for the Justice Department to win a court order that could force state officials to change how process mail-in ballots. The administration could now ask the Supreme Court to intervene, though the justices have long held that federal courts should not change balloting rules on the eve of an election.

The lawsuit has become part of an escalating, multipronged effort by the Trump administration in recent weeks to argue that elections are marred by votes from noncitizens, who cannot legally participate in federal elections. There are in fact vanishingly few documented instances of noncitizen voting, and California officials have argued that the list of names the Justice Department provided is riddled with errors.

The lawsuit comes as the administration has also been threatening criminal action over its noncitizen voting claims, issuing subpoenas to county election workers in California and charging 28 people with violating federal election laws. The efforts in California mirror others around the country and appear intended to cast doubt on the validity of the vote, as polls show Republicans may lose control of one or both chambers of Congress.

By a 2-to-1 vote, a majority of the panel wrote that stepping in to order that thousands of ballots be taken out of the usual tabulation channel would be an extraordinary disruption to the state’s electoral system so close to Election Day.

Judge Mark J. Bennett, who was appointed by President Trump, joined with Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented, writing that the Trump administration’s claims should be taken at face value.

“Both state and federal law prohibit aliens from voting in our elections,” he wrote. “Yet according to the federal government, those aliens received mail-in ballots for the upcoming election.”

California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, applauded the decision, saying that the Trump administration had “zero authority to interfere in California’s elections.”

“California law makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there are several state laws that guard against it. That is why it is exceptionally rare,” Mr. Bonta said in a statement. “The administration’s baseless claims of widespread fraud are an attempt to sow doubt in our democratic process and risk disenfranchising eligible voters. We will keep fighting to uphold the rule of law.”

The same group of appeals judges already declined on Monday to jump ahead of a lower-court judge and immediately rule for the administration.

Instead, they sent the case back to Judge David O. Carter, a district court judge who was initially assigned the case, and who sided with California on Wednesday. In grave terms, he wrote that the federal government’s demands threatened to “wreak havoc” on state election administration and “create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike.”

Judges Bennett and Sanchez raised similar questions when they originally heard the case on Sunday, asking whether the government’s data, which appeared to contain no definitive evidence of noncitizens voting, could produce false matches and disenfranchise lawfully registered voters.

Those concerns were reiterated in the order on Friday, which noted the “suspect reliability" of the lists of ostensibly noncitizens registered to vote in California that the Trump administration had distributed. It added that, in the majority’s view, “the United States effectively seeks to cancel (or potentially cancel)” batches of ballots based on flimsy evidence.

“This adds to our reasons for finding that overall, the district court did not abuse its discretion,” the order said.

It was a dizzying exchange that came a day after Ms. Stevens had said she would campaign with Dr. El-Sayed this weekend — a step that had briefly given Democrats hope that they were moving past a series of recent public criticisms she had made of him.

And it all came just four days ahead of an election in Michigan that could be critical in the battle for Senate control.

In a statement on Friday morning promoting her plan to join Dr. El-Sayed on the campaign trail, Ms. Stevens said that she expected Dr. El-Sayed to apologize for comments he had made about Israel and that she anticipated that he would disavow what she described as an antisemitic ad from an outside group. She also called on him to take down an ad from his campaign featuring Tucker Carlson.

“Abdul promises to get money out of politics,” Ms. Stevens said in the statement. “He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”

Dr. El-Sayed, a forceful critic of Israel, said in his statement on Friday evening that he had overcome millions of dollars in spending from corporations and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, during the primary.

“Now the stakes are even higher — defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidate, taking back the Senate, and defending our democracy,” Dr. El-Sayed continued. “That should be the priority for all of us right now. So while Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago, let’s all focus on the task at hand.”

It was not immediately clear what the dueling statements would mean for their planned appearance together on Sunday. A spokeswoman for Dr. El-Sayed, Roxie Richner, said Friday evening that “I don’t have anything else to share at this time.”

The exchange was the latest turn in an unusual and tense dance between Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens that has involved a widening circle of Democrats, including Representatives Debbie Dingell of Michigan and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, one of the highest-ranking African Americans in Congress.

The friction has added turbulence to the final week of a crucial race, raising concerns in the party about divisions that could be costly as Election Day nears.

Ms. Stevens, a centrist who lost to Dr. El-Sayed by less than a percentage point in a bitter August primary, has not been seen publicly with Dr. El-Sayed in the final stretch of the race, despite pledging during the summer to campaign with him.

Instead, Ms. Stevens, a strong supporter of Israel, has made a series of cable news appearances in which she has questioned his outreach to Black and Jewish voters.

Her fiancé, a Jewish Democrat, said Wednesday that he was backing Dr. El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee. The same day, Ms. Stevens said she would not campaign with Dr. El-Sayed before the election on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s events left Ms. Dingell, a leader of the party’s congressional delegation from Michigan, frustrated.

So, she said, she called Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens and told them that they should campaign together with Mr. Clyburn, the Democratic power broker from South Carolina.

By Thursday, a joint appearance with Dr. El-Sayed, Ms. Stevens and Mr. Clyburn had been scheduled for Sunday at a Black church in Detroit.

“I’m the one that made this happen,” Ms. Dingell said on Friday morning, adding the problem had been that Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens “weren’t talking.” When pressed by Ms. Dingell, “They said, OK,” she recalled.

“It was that simple,” she said.

Ms. Stevens said in an interview Friday that she had agreed to attend a church service with Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Clyburn because Mr. Clyburn asked her to do so.

“My buddy Clyburn called,” she said. “He’s just like, ‘I’m coming in.’”

She insisted there was not more to it.

“We’re not like, let’s all get on a Zoom and talk for two hours about an event and how to work with this and have a deal,” she said. “We’re not trying to broker or have a deal. You know, we’ve had a Black-Jewish working class alliance in the Democratic Party.”

But the dynamic between Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens is hardly simple.

And even as Ms. Stevens agreed to join Dr. El-Sayed, she suggested that her appearance was the product of an upcoming concession by Dr. El-Sayed — and sought to secure another.

In her statement, she said she understood that Dr. El-Sayed would disavow the ad from the outside group — a left-wing political action committee called Rebellion PAC — adding that she’d heard of those plans from party leaders and the news media. “That is why I accepted Congressman Clyburn’s invitation to appear with Abdul,” Ms. Stevens said.

The ad, set at a grocery store, suggests U.S. aid to Israel is the source of rising prices in America. It shows a shopper telling a man not to buy eggs because “we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”

Ms. Stevens argued in her statement that the ad “did not invent its argument” but advanced one that she said Dr. El-Sayed had been making on the campaign trail. “I therefore expect him to apologize,” she said.

Cenk Uygur, the founder of Rebellion PAC, argued that Ms. Stevens had a “strange” interpretation of the ad and that it was criticizing the Israeli government, not Jewish Americans.

But he said it would not bother him if Dr. El-Sayed denounced the commercial.

“He’s running a campaign,” Mr. Uygur said. “I’m running a PAC. He can say whatever he wants. I’m OK with it. We don’t speak with each other.”

In her statement, Ms. Stevens also called on Dr. El-Sayed to take down an ad from his campaign that features Mr. Carlson and other conservative figures weighing in on the race. Mr. Carlson, who has frequently embraced conspiracy theories and has said white supremacy is “not a real problem” in America, has spoken out against Mr. Rogers and defended Dr. El-Sayed’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Ms. Stevens said Dr. El-Sayed should pull the ad out of “respect for Michigan’s Black community.”

It was not clear if Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed had any direct communication.

Mr. Clyburn, who endorsed Ms. Stevens in the primary, said he would not discuss the planning of the Sunday event but acknowledged he had spoken with Ms. Dingell.

“I don’t know who else she talked to,” he said. “But she did talk to me.”

The arrival of Mr. Clyburn comes as Dr. El-Sayed is trying to overcome tension between Black and Arab American voters in the Detroit area.

He is also facing skepticism from some Jewish Democrats, who object to his fierce criticism of Israel. In late August, he apologized to a group of Jewish Democrats for using a phrase in March — “hurt people hurt people” — after an attack on a synagogue near Detroit.

“Nobody deserves to have their pain trampled on,” he said in his apology.

The primary race between Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens was personal and centered heavily on Israel. Dr. El-Sayed, highlighting Ms. Stevens’s support from AIPAC, once said the group had chosen to back the “least capable candidate in America.” Ms. Stevens said Dr. El-Sayed wanted to blame his “problems on Jewish Americans.”

After Dr. El-Sayed won, Ms. Stevens quickly endorsed him and they appeared together at a unity breakfast. She said the party had a “good ticket going” and was united.

But her fiancé, Jason Turkish, said Wednesday that he remained disappointed months later that Dr. El-Sayed had not appeared with Ms. Stevens at a news conference the day after the primary, and had instead joined Mallory McMorrow, another candidate who dropped out of the race in July and finished a distant third.

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Pope Leo, who is not registered with a political party, may be the first pope to vote in a national election, according to Vatican experts. A historian, Giovanni Maria Vian, the former director of the Vatican newspaper, said that he could not think of any pope who had voted in recent memory.

Roberto Rusconi, a church historian, said that an Italian pope would have had to go to a polling place in Italy, and he had no memory of that ever happening.

Elisabetta Piqué, who wrote a biography of Pope Francis, said that as far as she knew, Francis had never voted in an Argentine election during his 12-year papacy.

And Polish and German reporters who write about the Vatican were equally stumped, saying that they did not think that either John Paul II, who was Polish, or Benedict XVI, who was German, had voted in their national elections once they had become pontiffs.

American citizens who live abroad remain eligible to vote, and Pope Leo, who was born in Chicago and raised in the small suburb of Dolton, Ill., regularly cast absentee ballots in Illinois after moving abroad to Peru and Rome.

Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Pope Leo’s alma mater, said the pope had waded into uncharted territory.

“My opinion is that the pope should cast his last ballot in the conclave, when he’s elected,” he said.

Since the mid-19th century, Leo’s predecessors had opted to be “super partes” when it came to national politics, Mr. Faggioli said — “above parties and competing political bodies.” Leo’s predecessors believed they could exert moral suasion when necessary, “so they left behind their right to be politically active in their own country.”

Pope Leo, registered as Robert F. Prevost, has long used a family home in Will County, in the Chicago area, as an address. The pope requested a mail-in ballot in Illinois on Oct. 3, and the ballot was mailed on Oct. 5, said Kimberly Fladhammer, a county elections official.

Pope Leo has voted in at least 10 general elections since 2000, according to state and local records, including by absentee ballot for the 2024 presidential election. Voters in primary elections in Illinois may choose any party’s ballot at the polls, and Pope Leo has varied in his selection, picking Democratic ballots years ago and Republican ones more recently.

Illinois election guidelines allow mail-in ballots to be counted even if they arrive late. Ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 3, but they can arrive anytime in the two weeks after Election Day.

The Chicago Sun-Times first reported that the pope had requested a ballot for the midterm elections.

Mr. Marshall, a first-term senator, is facing an unexpectedly tight race to keep his seat, with recent polls showing him neck-and-neck with his Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932.

The lawsuit, filed in Kansas state court, focuses on the 18 percent interest rate that Mr. Marshall and the medical practice he co-owned, Heartland OBGYN, often charged patients.

It argues that the high rate was “egregious conduct” that may have violated Kansas law.

Kansas typically limits the interest rate that doctors and any other businesses can pursue in court to 15 percent. There are, however, some exceptions that allow them to pursue more if they had a pre-existing contract spelling out a higher rate.

A Marshall spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the litigation.

Steven Johnson, a lawyer who filed Mr. Marshall’s debt cases, previously told The Times that the 18 percent interest rate was set by the doctor’s office.

“Generally, at the time of services for all our clients if they were not paid up front, the Debtor agreed to an 18 percent interest rate,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a text message. He described this as “common practice” and “pretty much the way it works in the state of Kansas.”

Mr. Marshall, however, appears to have charged more interest than other doctors. The Kansas City Star reviewed debt collection filings from about 150 providers, and found no others charging 18 percent. Most charged 12 percent instead.

The Times has not been able to review the original contracts that Mr. Marshall signed with his patients, which are now decades old.

The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Meischa Zimmerman, was featured in The Times article. It is unclear whether other patients have joined the lawsuit, and Ms. Zimmerman’s lawyer could not be reached immediately for comment.

Mr. Marshall’s medical practice sued her in 2009 for $3,596 in outstanding debt related to the delivery of her daughter by cesarean section. She was arrested three times for missing court dates related to the case, once while she was eight-months pregnant and at home with her 2-year-old daughter.

Ms. Zimmerman’s experience has become a focal point of the Kansas Senate race, which polls show to be extremely close. After the Times article ran, Ms. Zimmerman participated in an ad for the Hamilton campaign in which she describes one of her arrests.

Mr. Marshall sent the Hamilton campaign a cease-and-desist letter regarding the advertisement, arguing that it was “defamatory” in how it described his debt collection practices.

The Hamilton campaign has defended the ad as accurate, and continues to run it on local television stations.

And then there is the president himself. He has been eager to hit the road, throw rallies and bask in the adulation of his fans.

“Is there anything better than a Trump rally?” the president called out to the crowd on Friday night in Daytona Beach, Fla.

But not every candidate has been so eager to welcome him.

The party’s challenge was on full display this week when Mr. Trump scheduled, canceled and rescheduled campaign rallies in two states that he won handily in 2024.

The president was initially scheduled to campaign in Kansas on Saturday and in Iowa on Sunday. But the Republican National Committee on Thursday canceled those events, with officials saying the candidates there were doing so well that the president was not needed. The R.N.C. said the rallies would be replaced with virtual events, which they said would allow Mr. Trump to reach voters in more states.

But less than 24 hours later, the rallies were back on. Officials said the in-person rallies had only been rearranged to accommodate the additional virtual events on the president’s schedule.

Mr. Trump said he decided to hold the in-person rallies after he received calls from officials in Kansas and Iowa asking him to travel there. He did not identify the people who called him.

“They said, ‘If you could go, it would be better than a tele-rally,’ and I tried to talk them out of that,” he told reporters on Friday afternoon in the Oval Office. “I said, ‘What about a tele-rally?’ But they asked me.”

Later Friday night, Mr. Trump told the crowd at his Florida rally that he thought it could be his last one.

“I thought this was it,” he said. “I thought I could relax. Twenty-eight days of this crap in a row is a lot. It’s a lot.”

He also recounted the calls he had received from people asking him to reschedule his trips to Kansas and Iowa.

“I said, ‘Does it matter?’” he said. “They said, ‘We just want to make sure that we win.’”

But some of the Republicans in the toughest races have not campaigned with the president, and many more have sought to distance themselves from his unpopular policies.

Mr. Trump’s approval rating sits at 37 percent, according to a New York Times poll tracker. Voters have particularly soured on Mr. Trump for his handling of the economy and the war in Iran. A recent national poll from The Times and Siena University found that likely voters preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts.

The president’s rallies are also not what they once were. He is almost always interrupted by protesters. His venues are smaller. The crowds are more sparse.

After the rally in Kansas was scrapped on Thursday, Mr. Trump lashed out at a reporter for asking about the decision.

“You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect,” Mr. Trump told reporters on his way back from a rally in South Carolina. He told the reporter who asked that question: “You are sick to ask that question,” adding, “You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.”

The president is now set to appear in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday afternoon, and in Salina, Kan., in the evening.

In those two states, polls show Democrats running strong races for governor and Senate. In 2024, Mr. Trump won Iowa by 13 points, and Kansas by 16 points.

Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump’s decision to cancel his rally in the state was a positive sign for his campaign.

“They think that I’m doing so well in the polls that he’s probably got better places to spend his time,” he told reporters.

But most polls show Mr. Marshall trailing Adam Hamilton, a pastor and the Democratic nominee.

Before heading to the Midwest, Mr. Trump returned home, holding the rally in Florida on Friday night for Representative Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, and Senator Ashley Moody, a Republican who is running for a full term.

“For the past 30 days, I’ve been traveling,” Mr. Trump said. “I have done more traveling. You know, Byron called. He said, ‘Do you mind doing a rally for me?' I said, ‘No, I’ll do it.’ And we’ve done, I think, 28, 29. You think it’s easy, but there’s such love all over the country.”

The president will spend the rest of the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club.

The temporary restraining order was just the latest in a succession of court losses for the department in the attempt to intervene in state-administered elections to prevent illegal voting by immigrants, which is exceedingly rare.

Judge Thompson ordered the department not to “threaten, intimidate or coerce state or local elections officials or workers to demand that they halt processing the ballots” based on the government’s suspicion the voter might be a noncitizen. Her order is set to expire after Tuesday’s election. She scheduled a hearing for Monday.

“One of the hallmarks of a fair election is the freedom to exercise the right to vote free from threat, fear, or intimidation,” she wrote. “Free exercise of the right to vote is a core tenet of our democracy. It requires safeguarding.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department’s leaders have repeatedly said their efforts were not motivated by politics or President Trump’s demands, but rather a good-faith effort to ensure that every ballot cast in the midterms was lawful.

A coalition of unions representing election workers in California and civil rights groups filed the lawsuit early Friday morning.

Norman Eisen, a former Obama administration official and a lead counsel who helped draft the lawsuit, said the order represented an extraordinary rebuke of the department.

“There has never been a threat like this, and there has never been an order exactly like this — although it is grounded in well-established precedent,” he said.

“WOW!!” wrote California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, on social media. “The Trump Administration just lost ANOTHER election related case.”

Judge Thompson, appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2022, said she needed to move speedily “to ensure full participation and public trust in our elections” against the department’s threat of subpoenas to officials around the state.

“Election Day is around the corner,” she wrote. “Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots. Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”

The lawsuit is a legal counterattack against political appointees at the department who, in recent days, have intensified their campaign to stop voting by undocumented immigrants.

Earlier Friday, a federal appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request that it order California officials to set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claimed had been sent to possible noncitizens.

The unions — including the Service Employees International Union, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — sought to block the department from pressuring local officials to stop counting ballots and turn over election data, and to drop its threats to criminally prosecute officials who do not comply with their demands.

The pressure exerted by the department is the most aggressive intervention by federal law enforcement in elections in recent history. It comes at the direction of Mr. Trump, who has spread falsehoods about undocumented immigrants voting in large numbers and has sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost.

The lawsuit accuses Attorney General Todd Blanche and other top Trump appointees at the department of engaging “in a coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees.”

On Thursday, the department widened a criminal investigation of California officials, issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials, after their efforts to prove thousands of noncitizens were on California’s voter rolls foundered in court.

The lawsuit accused the department of relying on flawed or false information on voters provided by the Department of Homeland Security. It claimed that the D.H.S. “obtained data from obscure and insecure sources” and augmented it through “commercially available AI of questionable reliability.”

Department officials have privately conceded that all their recent efforts in California — a Democrat-dominated state that has been the target of frequent White House attacks — are unlikely to block the issuance and counting of ballots.

And they have not committed to continuing their legal campaign after Election Day, a senior official involved in the effort said on Thursday.

The plaintiffs, part of a broader coalition of progressive groups that also includes the NAACP, have long been preparing for the possibility that the department would seek to exert legal pressure on state and local officials.

Laurel Rosenhall contributed.

Her comments, during an appearance on the “On Brand” podcast hosted by Donny Deutsch, an advertising executive and former cable news personality, came in response to a question that characterized both Mr. Mamdani and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, as saying “that Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state.”

Ms. Pelosi said any Democrat holding such views did not reflect the position of the party as a whole.

“People represent their districts, and we have to respect that,” she said. She later added that “that doesn’t mean it has an impact on the consensus of the Democratic Party.”

“This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress,” Ms. Pelosi added, referring to Dr. El-Sayed. “But the mayor, bless his heart, I hope he succeeds as mayor. But I don’t agree with some of the things he has said.”

During the podcast, Mr. Deutsch told Ms. Pelosi that it was “upsetting” to him, as a lifelong Democrat and a Jewish man, to see leading voices in the party appear to abandon support for Israel.

“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Deutsch said.

“Who says that?” Ms. Pelosi asked. Mr. Deutsch named Mr. Mamdani and Dr. El-Sayed, adding that he considered their views “concerning.”

“It’s more than concerning: It’s wrong,” Ms. Pelosi said. “And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress.”

Representatives for Mr. Mamdani and Dr. El-Sayed did not comment on Ms. Pelosi’s remarks.

Ms. Pelosi’s comments reflected how Israel’s war in Gaza and the American-Israeli war against Iran have fractured Democrats. The United States’ military support of Israel has divided both parties, and surveys have shown that Americans are closely split in their support for Israel and the Palestinians.

On Friday, Ms. Pelosi urged Americans to support Dr. El-Sayed and other Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

“Make no mistake: Democrats are united in a big blue wave For The People,” Ms. Pelosi wrote on social media. “To lower costs, protect healthcare and defend our democracy, we must elect a Democratic House and Senate.”

Her spokesman, Nicholas Martin, acknowledged her differences with Dr. El-Sayed but underscored her support for him.

“While they may disagree on some issues, she is united with him in the fight to lower costs, protect health care and defend our democracy,” Mr. Martin said in an emailed statement. “The stakes in this election could not be higher, and she believes all Democrats must come together to win back the Congress and deliver for the American people.”

Both Mr. Mamdani and Dr. El-Sayed, Muslim politicians who belong to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, have faced pushback from some rabbis and Jewish organizations for their views on Israel. The men have said that their criticism is aimed at the Israeli government and that they respect the Jewish community.

Dr. El-Sayed has disputed any country’s right to be organized around an ethnic, racial or religious group. And Mr. Mamdani has said he supports Israel “as a state with equal rights” but not one that is based on privileging one religion.

Mr. Mamdani has long criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which was set off by the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people in Israel. The Israeli war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials.

Dr. El-Sayed has opposed U.S. military support to foreign nations. “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” he said of Israel in a recent television interview.

Ms. Pelosi said it was necessary to distinguish individual politicians’ views from the party’s broader consensus, but that it was most important that Democratic candidates win in the midterms.

“We have to win big, so that doesn’t really matter,” Ms. Pelosi said.

If that were to happen, Mr. Musk told his 241.5 million followers on X, the Democrats’ agenda “would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.”

He continued: “All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.”

Mr. Musk’s rhetoric, heated as it is, partly explains why he has spent so much on the midterms. Mr. Musk later added that he himself voted early, on Thursday in his home state of Texas. The state is home to a sharply competitive Senate race.

Another Silicon Valley billionaire who agrees that the elections matter, of course, is the Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, who was for decades a close friend of Mr. Musk’s but has turned into a political and business rival. Mr. Hoffman has donated $16.5 million to support James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, part of tens of millions of dollars he has spent on the midterms.

“We should get money out of politics,” Mr. Hoffman said himself in a separate post on X on Friday, defending the $8 million he donated in recent weeks to support Democrats in Wisconsin. “And while others spend outrageous amounts to keep authoritarian clowns in power, those of us who believe in the ideals of America cannot yield.”

“I am not interested in tricking voters,” she added.

A day earlier, The New York Times reported that Democratic operatives, including senior advisers to her campaign, had spent months secretly recruiting candidates with the same name as the state’s Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, in an effort to draw votes away from him. They succeeded, and the ballot includes a candidate named Dan J. Sullivan.

The endeavor involved campaign lawyers for Ms. Peltola as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, The Times reported. In a series of interviews, Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, said that Ms. Peltola had not been directly part of the effort but that she was “definitely aware.”

Ms. Rios, who was fired from the campaign in August, said she had been involved in the plan, as was Ms. Peltola’s chief of staff.

The Peltola campaign and the Democratic campaign committee have denied any involvement in the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan, the teacher who entered the race in the spring. Mr. Sullivan, of Petersburg, Alaska, has also denied being recruited. Earlier this week, Ms. Peltola brushed off revelations about the secretive effort as “just another distraction.”

Ballot stacking is widely considered legal, an age-old practice that has been used by both parties. In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that both Dan Sullivans could remain in the race. But Republican anger has grown over new details of the secret plan to aid Ms. Peltola’s campaign.

On Thursday, the Justice Department issued dozens of subpoenas to people believed to be connected to the ballot-stacking plan, according to two officials familiar with the investigation. It was not clear whether the inquiry would result in criminal charges.

The Republican chairman of a House oversight committee has also separately sought interviews with two people involved with the plan. In a complaint filed Thursday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee called on the Federal Election Commission to investigate Ms. Peltola’s campaign, claiming that her campaign broke campaign finance laws through illegal coordination with outside political committees. And the Trump administration has filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking to block the certification of Alaska’s election results if Senator Sullivan loses.

The vote in Alaska on Tuesday is expected to help determine which party controls the Senate. Ms. Peltola, the only Democrat on the ballot, is leading the polls, ahead of the incumbent Republican as well as Dan J. Sullivan and a fourth long-shot candidate whom The Times found was also recruited into the race.

Kellen Browning contributed reporting to this article.