Immigrant advocacy groups in Washington State filed suit late Friday night seeking to bar the Trump administration from forcing state election officials to set aside ballots from nearly 400 residents the administration believes may not be citizens.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Seattle, was the latest legal move taken to stave off pressure from the White House to stop noncitizens from voting — even though the administration has often been wrong about whether registered voters are citizens.
The suit in Seattle came in response to a letter that federal prosecutors sent on Monday to Washington’s secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, demanding that he instruct election officials not to accept ballots from the 400 people until federal agencies could determine their citizenship.
Days later, Trent McCotter, the No. 2 official in the Justice Department, followed up with a second letter reminding Mr. Hobbs that mishandling ballots is a federal crime.
The suit from the advocacy groups took issue with both the accuracy of the list of voters sent to Mr. Hobbs and what it characterized as veiled threats of prosecution by senior Justice Department officials.
“Defendants’ list is not evidence of anything,” the suit maintained, “and their deeply chilling threats of federal penalty for election officials and others who fail to conform to their demands are baseless.”
Washington is not the only state that has faced heavy pressure from the Trump administration to set aside ballots from voters deemed to be ineligible because of their citizenship.
The administration sued California state officials, seeking to force them to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 registered voters it said were noncitizens. That move was blocked for the second time on Friday by a federal appeals court, which determined that granting the government’s request would have undermined California’s authority over its election procedures and violated the “plain text” of the Constitution.
In a parallel effort, the Justice Department has issued a flurry of subpoenas to California state election officials in a widening criminal investigation seeking to prove its unsubstantiated claims that thousands of noncitizens are on California’s voter rolls.
But, in a major setback to the administration, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a ruling late on Friday blocking the Justice Department from threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with its directives on handling ballots.
The ruling, by Judge Trina L. Thompson, ordered the department not to “threaten, intimidate or coerce state or local elections officials or workers to demand that they halt processing the ballots” based on the government’s suspicion that the voters might be noncitizens. She has scheduled a hearing for Monday.
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