Justice Department asks Washington state to void ballots of 400 suspected non-citizens

Washington- Federal prosecutors in Washington state on Monday asked its top election official to void the ballots of more than 400 people they say are not U.S. citizens, expanding the Justice Department’s efforts to question the accuracy of state voter rolls just days before the midterm elections.

Neil Floyd, acting U.S. attorney in Seattle, and Pete Serrano, the chief federal prosecutor in Eastern Washington, said they believe many of the more than 400 registered voters are green card holders, have legal immigration status but are not U.S. citizens and cannot vote in federal elections.

Still, prosecutors said the alleged noncitizens voted in several elections, and Floyd estimated that more than 1,500 ballots were cast illegally.

“That’s not the total number of noncitizens who voted in Washington,” Floyd said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Floyd and Serrano said they provided Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs with a list of 405 people the Justice Department says are illegally registered to vote and requested that any ballots they might cast be segregated until their citizenship status is confirmed.

In a letter to Hobbs dated Monday, they said some of the people identified by the Department of Homeland Security as noncitizens had voted in elections as recent as the August primary. Some people have been voting in Washington for more than a decade and have voted more than two dozen times, Floyd and Serrano said.

DHS is expected to “imminently” send a second list of people it says are not U.S. citizens, which will then be shared with elections officials in Washington, prosecutors said.

Floyd and Serrano gave the secretary of state 48 hours, until Wednesday, to review the list of 400 registered voters to determine whether they are U.S. citizens and order election officials not to tabulate ballots received from them until citizenship can be determined.

“If you fail to implement this process by then, given the ongoing federal election, the United States will have no choice but to request emergency assistance,” they write.

Hobbs confirmed that his office had received the letter from the Justice Department, but raised concerns about the accuracy of its list, which shows the last time each person voted. The department has included several records for people who appear to have last voted in the 1990s, including a record for a person who last voted in 1994, according to the secretary of state’s office. Since then, more than 113 million primary and general election ballots have been cast.

“We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and we don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed,” Hobbs said in a statement.

He said the timing of the Justice Department’s request, made a week before the Nov. 3 election, “is undoubtedly intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”

Last year, the Justice Department requested the unredacted list of Washington state voter rolls. After Hobbs refused to provide the information, the Trump administration sued the state in an effort to obtain the records, which include voters’ names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

A federal judge rejected the request of the Ministry of Justice trial last month. The Trump administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to obtain their complete voter rolls, and 27 of those lawsuits have been dismissed by federal judges. Three cases remain pending. One of them, against Oklahoma, was intentionally rejected.

Floyd said at a news conference that because Washington refused to provide its unredacted voter rolls, the Department of Homeland Security used a publicly available list of registered voters in the state and compared it to government information to identify those who would not be U.S. citizens. The Trump administration then investigated further to see if those people had voted in Washington, he said.

But the secretary of state’s office warned that the system used by the Justice Department mistakenly identifies legitimate U.S. citizens as noncitizens, putting their right to vote at risk.

Under federal law, it is a crime for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections, and cases of non-citizen voting are rare.

“At a time when thousands of Washington voters are already facing ballot denials due to postmark delays, our goal should be to ensure that every eligible voter can exercise their right to vote, without creating additional uncertainty about their eligibility,” Hobbs said.

Effort to void hundreds of ballots in Washington comes after Justice Department sent letters to election officials in California earlier this month, asking them to separate absentee ballots expressed by registered voters who the government claims are non-citizens.

Trump administration lawyers have given California election officials 48 hours to review a list of purported non-citizens and verify their citizenship status.

The Department of Justice continued file a complaint against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/Clerk Dean Logan. He asked a federal court to block the state from tabulating ballots received from 20,000 people he says are likely noncitizens until their citizenship status can be verified.

A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday on the Justice Department’s attempt to force California to void mail-in ballots from voters on its list. A long-running effort by the Trump administration to obtain an order from a federal appeals court was dismissed Monday evening.

So far, the Justice Department has sent only a letter to Washington and has yet to file a lawsuit seeking to force its election officials to separate ballots returned by the 400 suspected noncitizens.