What the government asked this court to do
The Justice Department sued California on October 15 and asked Judge David Carter for a temporary restraining order, an emergency order that changes how an election runs before a full trial. The government wanted county workers to pull ballots from its federal list of more than 20,000 registered voters aside and leave them uncounted in the November 3 midterms.
He denied it.
A vote set aside on suspicion alone is a vote taken from a citizen with no trial and no appeal. His opening sentence deserves your highlighter: "Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch."1
Standing, and why the government started the case already losing
Standing means the legal right to bring a case into court in the first place. Standing comes first. Carter found the Justice Department likely lacks standing and likely lacks a cause of action, the legal claim a judge needs before a court reaches a remedy, and he found the federal criminal law against noncitizen voting hands prosecutors a tool for charging a person and hands that law zero authority over California ballot processing rules.