The Trump administration can’t force Washington state election officials to set aside ballots from 400-plus voters alleged to be noncitizens, a federal judge in Seattle ruled Thursday.
The temporary court order stymies a longshot bid from the U.S. Department of Justice to leave ballots from those voters uncounted while authorities investigated their eligibility, a step that the state refused.
The ruling is unsurprising in light of the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting a similar push in California, which was in line with a federal appeals court decision that covers Washington and other western states.
The fast-moving saga kicked off just last week, when federal prosecutors from western and eastern Washington, Charles Neil Floyd and Pete Serrano, alleged Washington’s voter rolls contained at least 405 noncitizens who’d voted upward of 1,500 times in elections dating back decades. Floyd and Serrano pushed the state to not count those ballots, and said the preliminary list was just the “tip of the iceberg.”
This was just over a week out from Election Day, which saw Democrats make massive gains nationally.
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, countered that the federal list included U.S. citizens and lacked evidence to prove the voters’ status. He called the letter he received from Floyd and Serrano a “dumpster fire disguised as a legal document.”
“If the DOJ has identified noncitizen voters on our voter roll, they should provide us with accurate and complete information so we can investigate according to state and federal law,” Hobbs said in a statement Thursday evening. “Eligible voters should not be disenfranchised because of unsupported allegations.”
Hobbs has said the state doesn’t have a way to confirm if noncitizens are on the state’s voter rolls, but they would be caught if they voted.
