Voting Groups Sue Trump Administration Over Washington Order to Set Aside 400 Ballots

Three Washington state advocacy organizations sued President Trump and top federal law enforcement officials on Friday, asking a federal judge to stop the Justice Department from forcing the state to set aside mail ballots from more than 400 registered voters the administration contends may not be U.S. citizens. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, came four days after federal prosecutors sent Secretary of State Steve Hobbs a list of names and told him to instruct county officials not to verify signatures or tally those ballots until citizenship could be confirmed.

The suit, OneAmerica Votes v. Trump, was brought by OneAmerica Votes, the Latino Community Fund of Washington State and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, represented by the Elias Law Group. It names Trump, the Department of Justice, Attorney General Todd Blanche, acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Simon Peter Serrano, the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin as defendants. It is the latest in a string of eleventh-hour legal fights over Trump administration claims of noncitizen voting that have touched California, Nevada, Arizona and now Washington in the campaign's final stretch.

What the Justice Department demanded

According to the complaint, two federal prosecutors wrote to Hobbs on Oct. 26 — eight days before Election Day — with a list of roughly 400 registered voters that federal agencies believe "are or were noncitizens," while conceding in the same letter that those voters "may have subsequently naturalized." The letter instructed the secretary of state to direct county election officials not to proceed with signature verification or tabulation of those voters' ballots until their citizenship "can be determined," and gave the state 48 hours to comply.

The same day, according to the filing, federal prosecutors and a DHS official held a news conference warning that anyone who "assists" a noncitizen in voting — including the election officials who process ballots — could be prosecuted as an aider and abettor. Three days later, the complaint says, the acting deputy attorney general sent Hobbs a separate letter reminding him that mishandling ballots and envelopes is a federal crime punishable by imprisonment. The Justice Department told the state to expect additional lists of suspected noncitizen registrants before Election Day. Washington's attorney general, Nick Brown, has separately pushed back on the administration's broader election-oversight efforts, having led a joint lawsuit with Oregon last year challenging a presidential executive order on elections that the states argued exceeded federal authority under the Constitution's Elections Clause.

By the numbers

The dispute centers on precise but disputed figures. Federal prosecutors said at their Oct. 26 news conference that they had identified 405 people they believe are noncitizens who have cast more than 1,500 ballots across past Washington elections. Hobbs's office disputed that characterization almost immediately. In an Oct. 28 response, cited in the lawsuit, the secretary of state said a preliminary review found the list included U.S. citizens and "a significant number of people" who were either not currently registered to vote or listed as inactive. His office noted that one record on the list dated to 1994.

The complaint also points to a factual error in the Oct. 26 letter itself — it misstated Election Day as "November 2, 2026" rather than the actual date of Nov. 3 — and cites a pattern the plaintiffs say undercuts the administration's numbers nationally. In California, where the Justice Department made a similar demand covering more than 20,000 registered voters, court filings found more than a quarter of a sampled set of records reflected a U.S. birthplace. In Nevada, the complaint says, a DHS claim of nearly 16,000 noncitizen registrants collapsed first to 185 and then to zero after further review. Hobbs's office has also said it received roughly 60 federal subpoenas for individual voter records in the month before the suit was filed, according to a report on the dispute. A federal judge separately dismissed, with prejudice, a Justice Department lawsuit against Hobbs in September seeking the state's full voter-roll data — a decision the Campaign Legal Center, which represented intervenors in that case, counted as the 25th loss nationally for the department in similar voter-roll litigation.

Who the dispute touches

Washington conducts its elections entirely by mail, with ballots already in voters' hands statewide and many already returned by the time the Oct. 26 letter arrived. The roughly 400 flagged voters — the plaintiffs argue most are likely lawful, including naturalized citizens who the complaint says are "most likely to be misidentified by federal records" — would have had their ballots held back from counting under the DOJ's instructions had the state complied. The suit also names county election administrators as indirectly affected, arguing the Justice Department's threats of prosecution put them in the position of either following state law, which requires processing validly cast ballots, or complying with what the plaintiffs call "baseless" federal demands under threat of criminal exposure. The three plaintiff organizations — a civic-engagement nonprofit, a Latino community group and a national food and retail workers' union — say their own members and the voters they work to register and turn out are among those put at risk of disenfranchisement or chilled from voting altogether.

"With ballots already in the hands of Washington voters, the President, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and their agents have brought to our State a flagrantly unlawful, chilling, eleventh-hour operation purporting to target 'noncitizen voters' — most, if not all of whom are likely lawful voters — and election officials who count their ballots pursuant to State law."

Reaction and what's next

Hobbs, a Democrat, has publicly rejected the Justice Department's findings. "The timing of this request — one week before the general election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results," he said, according to KUOW, Seattle's NPR affiliate. Acting U.S. Attorney Floyd said at the Oct. 26 news conference that while no one on the list has yet been charged, "I do anticipate that we will." Not all state officials agree with Hobbs's framing: Washington Republican Party Chair Jim Walsh has argued the federal findings expose a real flaw in the state's automatic voter registration system. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the administration's conduct — which the complaint calls the "Washington Ballot Operation" — unlawful under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, the Tenth Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, and to block further federal interference with the state's election process and threats against election officials.

No judge had been publicly assigned to the case as of Sunday, and the Justice Department had not filed a response. The filing leans heavily on a parallel fight in California, where a federal judge in the Central District rejected a Justice Department bid to force the state to sequester ballots tied to a larger voter list, and an appellate panel separately declined to pause that ruling this week. Washington's case differs in one respect the plaintiffs emphasize: rather than suing the state outright, as it did in California, the Justice Department in Washington has relied on letters and public threats aimed directly at county officials, which the complaint argues was a deliberate attempt "to bypass the scrutiny of the judiciary." With Election Day two days away and additional DOJ lists reportedly still coming, the plaintiffs are seeking emergency relief before any ballots are set aside or left uncounted.