A Seattle federal judge slammed the brakes on the Trump Justice Department’s bid to keep Washington ballots out of the count, ordering it to stop demanding that votes from suspected noncitizens be set aside and to quit threatening election officials who refuse to play along.
According to Politico, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Biden appointee, issued a temporary restraining order Thursday evening. He was acting on a suit brought last week by a Latino group, a labor union and a get-out-the-vote organization.
“For the next two weeks, while Washington’s counties count and certify the ballots already cast, DOJ may not demand that election officials set aside a registered voter’s ballot because the voter’s name appears on a federal list and may not threaten those officials with prosecution for counting votes as state law requires,” wrote Whitehead.
The litigation came about after the top federal prosecutors in Washington sent a list of some 400 voters to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs on Oct. 26. The prosecutors said the people on the list were suspected noncitizens who had voted in prior elections and pressed for their ballots to go uncounted “until citizenship can be determined.”
Voting in the midterms has concluded, but election workers are still at it, counting ballots from voters who might be on the Trump administration’s list. Washington officials say the list is full of errors and probably has legitimate voters on it. In his ruling, Whitehead saw the DOJ letter as an improper way of getting around Washington state election law with no guarantee the people named were in fact ineligible.
“Voters who followed the rules should not lose their votes to a list that even its authors admit may include citizens,” he wrote.
The matter is not without precedent. A list of some 20,000 names from the DOJ to California officials has been the source of several court battles, one of which saw the Trump administration try to have state officials separate out the ballots of anyone on the list. After a judge and the federal appeals court in California refused to order those ballots set aside, the Supreme Court summarily put an end to the DOJ’s final appeal.
Elsewhere, a San Francisco federal judge put an order in place last week to bar the DOJ from threatening prosecution of election workers across the country, though the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals put a hold on that earlier in the week.
And on Monday, a judge in Washington, D.C., told the Justice Department to stop telling California to deviate from its procedures or segregate ballots over the presence of a voter’s name on a list of suspected noncitizens.