Eight days before Election Day, the Justice Department asked Washington state to set aside the ballots of more than 400 registered voters it says may not be citizens, and Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the timing was “no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.” It is the second state this month to get a demand like it, and the first has not gone well in court.
“The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”
The 9th Circuit panel, refusing to order California to set aside 20,000 mail ballots
Here is the calendar nobody has put on one page.
- Oct. 13. The department gives California a list of “more than 20,000” names and 48 hours to segregate their ballots. At one name a minute, that takes seven people working without sleep.
- Oct. 15. It sues California to keep the ballots separated until they are verified.
- Oct. 26. A 9th Circuit panel rules 2-1 that it has no jurisdiction. The majority includes a Trump appointee, and a second Trump appointee, Judge Patrick Bumatay, dissented.
- Oct. 26. The acting U.S. attorney in Seattle says investigators matched public voter files against Homeland Security data and asks Washington to hold the ballots of 400-plus voters.
- Oct. 26. Trump says anyone reporting voter fraud will be paid $1,000,000 “upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud.”
- Nov. 3. Election Day.
A List Is Not a Case
The pattern is a deadline, a list and no method. The California list has produced 28 criminal complaints, one per 714 names, by our count. Hobbs says he does not know where the Washington names came from and that the department is harassing actual citizens, and his office points to a federal law that limits removing voters within 90 days of an election.
For scale, Washington rejected just over 20,000 ballots for late postmarks in its August primary. That is roughly one in 95 returned ballots, against one in 870 in the 2024 general election, and Hobbs and other state election leaders blame federal postal changes. It is about fifty times the size of the department’s list.
The reward is the same move in a different costume. A million dollars paid on conviction cannot reach anyone before the polls close, because nobody is convicted of anything in eight days. It can only buy accusations in the meantime. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tried it in 2020 with a $1 million fund, and it paid out $25,000 to a Pennsylvania poll worker whose tip led to the conviction of a Republican who voted twice.
We think this is a campaign, not an enforcement program. Enforcement charges people and shows a judge its method before the count, as the department did with its 28. Announcing hundreds of names in the last week, with a deadline and a bounty, puts doubt in the air and leaves the proof for later. The department should publish how it built each list, the courts should keep refusing emergencies the department created, and election officials should count every ballot cast by someone entitled to cast it.
Judge David Carter hears the California case Tuesday afternoon, with more than 331,000 mail ballots already received in Los Angeles County alone.