DOJ Tells Washington State To Set Aside Ballots of 400 Voters It Claims are Noncitizens

The California Scheme Comes to Washington State

The Department of Justice on Wednesday told Washington state officials to segregate ballots from 400 people who it claimed are — or, at least, “appear to be” — noncitizens registered to vote.

It’s a repeat of what the DOJ has undertaken in California — first in Los Angeles and then in each other county in the state.

“People who are non-citizens are registered to vote and are voting in our state,” Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, claimed in a press release yesterday. Floyd is a former immigration judge who was hand-picked by President Trump for the post. “We have identified over 400 non-citizens who are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections.”

The DOJ’s claims to have found large numbers of noncitizen voters have repeatedly fallen apart. Some California county officials said the lists of supposed noncitizen voters provided to them by the DOJ contained only people who had not voted. Others said the lists contained people who did not live in the county in question. The DOJ this summer claimed to have found 16,000 noncitizen voters in Nevada, a number it eventually reduced to 185. As Nevada officials investigated, it turned out none of those people identified were, in fact, noncitizen voters.

In recent weeks, the DOJ has also been charging alleged noncitizen voters, a few dozen at a time. Its not clear how solid those cases are, and they will not have a chance to be litigated before the election.

“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 don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed,” a spokesperson for Washington’s secretary of state said in an email to NBC. “The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”

In California, a federal appeals court ruled 2-1 yesterday that it could not order Los Angeles to go forward with the DOJ’s similar demand there — that local officials segregate ballots. The court did not reach the merits, finding on procedural grounds that it was not time for it to weigh in. But the judges suggested the outcome would have been similar on the merits.

Despite its sloppiness, the impact of the DOJ’s scheme is two-fold.

First, it serves to bolster Trump’s frequent but baseless claims that noncitizen voting happens on a mass scale and swings elections. This will become useful after the election, as the administration seeks to further undermine confidence in the result.

Second, the claims — coupled with recent operations to arrest alleged noncitizen voters, a DOJ program dispatching poll watchers to blue cities, Trump’s offer of a bounty for “voter fraud,” and a noted escalation in anti-immigrant rhetoric — stand to suppress turnout among voters who are legally registered but who nonetheless fear getting caught in the administration’s crosshairs.

Bolsonaro Family Hits a Rough Patch

• The tale of President Trump’s Brazilian ally Flávio Bolsonaro has gotten grimmer in the 24 hours following his surprising loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
• First, Trump declined to vigorously back Bolsonaro’s charges that his election loss was tainted. Trump called the election “rigged,” but didn’t go further. Soon after, Bolsonaro backed off his vow to try to get the outcome annulled.
• Also yesterday, Bolsonaro’s was ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court to hand over his passport as he is under investigation for an alleged a money laundering scheme.
• Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has been living in Texas, and had suggested publicly that Flávio should leave the country. Eduardo, after being convicted for a scheme to get the Trump administration to intervene in his father Jair Bolsonaro’s trial following his coup attempt, has been, from Texas, lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in his brother’s now unsuccessful presidential campaign. 

Tabs

• The Trump administration charged former FBI Director James Comey for a third time, the New York Times reports — this time over an allegation of leaking to the New York Times that, Comey’s lawyers say, has been examined multiple times already by prosecutors, who declined to charge. These latest charges came via a criminal information, not a grand jury indictment — a revealing detail, Comey’s lawyers say, suggesting the administration messed up by not successfully obtaining an indictment before the 10-year statute of limitations expired earlier this year.
• As Democrats denounce the Trump administration’s attempt to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)— who has substantial policy differences with her, but who has defended her against Trump before — has remained curiously silent. Christopher Mathias examines that conspicuous silence for TPM.

Man of the Hour

It’s Vivek Ramaswamy, whose horrifically bad ad featuring Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s estranged mother, who married her child’s alleged rapist, continues to generate historic levels of blowback. Now, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has suspended its policy of not endorsing candidates to endorse against Ramaswamy. “A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party,” the editorial board wrote.