Washington State Describes DOJ’s Supposed Noncitizen Voter List as ‘Not Reliable’
Washington State late Wednesday responded to the DOJ’s demand that it segregate 400 ballots from supposed noncitizen voters. Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs wrote in a letter to the state’s two U.S. attorneys, would not be doing as the DOJ asked.
“This list includes United States citizens and is not reliable,” he wrote. “Without individualized proof of ineligibility, it would be both irresponsible and illegal for election officials to decline to process a registered voter’s ballot. If you have individualized proof, I invite you to provide it so election officials can take appropriate steps that are consistent with federal and state law.”
Hobbs also described the timing of the letter as “profoundly disappointing,” noting that Washington had mailed out ballots weeks ago.
“Despite that, you sent your letter well after that date and barely one week before Election Day,” it continued. “As you know, my office holds regular consultations with your office in the months leading up to elections. If you had valid concerns about voter registrations, the time to raise them was months ago. Your decision to wait until the eve of an election and announce those concerns at a press conference instead of timely providing the list and any corroborating evidence to my office is not a sign of good faith to ensure a free, fair, and accurate election.”
The DOJ sent similar lists to various counties in California, ordering officials there to segregate ballots from people on the lists. But those lists had similar problems to Washington’s. One county election official received a list of people who did not live in her county; another received a list of people who had not voted, according to the New York Times.
In a statement that I first saw reported by CalMatters, Butte County, California’s Clerk-Recorder said the list he received was “a print screen of a poorly formatted excel spreadsheet with missing and jumbled information.” He said of the 47 people on the list the DOJ sent to him, 32 were not on the active voter rolls and were not sent ballots; seven others “did not have sufficient information … to match to our voter list with confidence”; and six entries seemed to describe people who may not have been eligible to vote, but the DOJ did not provide evidence on why it believed that to be the case.
“Given the overall inaccuracy of the list provided and its lack of specificity, I believe the Department of Justice has not met that burden,” the clerk-recorder, Keaton Denlay, said. “There will be no further action taken at this time.”
“Happy voting,” he signed off.
Late Wednesday, a federal district court declined to order Los Angeles to carry out the scheme in a case that’s become the primary vehicle for deciding the legality of what the DOJ is trying to do.
“Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable. Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred,” judge David O. Carter wrote. “If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger.
“This Court declines to be a party to such process,” he concluded.
Flávio Bolsonaro Says He Is the True Leader of Brazil
Flavio Bolsonaro steps off a plane after arriving at Opa Locka Executive Airport in Miami, Florida on October 28, 2026. Brazil’s defeated right-wing presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro stepped out of a private plane in Florida today, AFP witnessed, despite a court order banning him from leaving his country. His plane touched down at Opa-Locka Executive Airport outside Miami after flying from Argentina with a stopover in Ecuador, as speculation had swirled for days over his whereabouts. (Photo by Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images)
I’ve been writing about the saga of Flávio Bolsonaro here over the last few days in part because his movement has overlap with right-wing nationalism in the U.S. in ways that go deeper than the superficial similarities. Yes, his father Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 attempted a coup that looked extremely similar to January 6. Yes, the Bolsonaro family has drawn on support from the same influencers and operatives who push Trump, including Steve Bannon and Nick Shirley.
But Bolsonaro and Trump’s movement is hyper-connected in more nuanced ways, and often motivated by the same very-online culture war greivances — a description that also applies to Argentina’s Javier Milei and various right-wing actors in Europe. Its a relationship that sees the Latin American leaders and their allies repeatedly turn up at places like CPAC, while Trump’s biggest supporters also travel the globe, trying to build something that draws on but extends beyond America’s unique strain of right-wing nationalism. There’s also the cross-pollination of ideas: DOGE was inspired in part by Milei; the State Department’s Office of Remigration takes its name from European ultra-nationalists.
So anyway, the latest with Flávio: In a letter posted to X (where else) Wednesday, he described himself as Brazil’s leader, and thanked Milei and Trump for assisting with his covert flight to the U.S.
His allies, however, described to the Washington Post a fractured movement unsure of its next steps.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, has a fascinatingly detailed story on his escape, including the use of decoys to confound authorities, describing his journey by car from Brazil into Argentina, then to Ecuador, and on to Miami.
Tabs
Jason Turkish, fiancé to former Michigan candidate for Senate Haley Stevens (D), says he will vote for Republican Mike Rogers. Though Michigan Democrats were praised for coming together to back voters’ candidate of choice after a nasty, three-way primary, Turkish, a prolific political donor who has supported both parties, is undercutting that just a bit, explaining in detail to the Detroit News why he cannot vote for Abdul El-Sayed. “We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul,” he says. Theirs is “a household divided,” Stevens offered to CNN.
Google’s Gemini will not give a straight answer on who won the 2020 election, Mediaite reported yesterday, encouraging users who asked the question to “review the documents provided by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the records maintained by the National Archives.” The company told Business Insider it was trying to fix the issue.
Man of the Hour
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 19: Founder of Project Veritas James O’Keefe walks the red carpet at the Turning Point USA Inaugural-Eve Ball at the Salamander Hotel on January 19, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
It’s James O’Keefe, the notorious conservative influencer known for highly misleading hidden-camera stings. In an attempt to show how easy it is to commit voter fraud in Minnesota, O’Keefe and a fellow influencer dressed in “Muslim” clothes and visited polling sites. On Wednesday, they were hit with state charges for allegedly committing the very crimes they tried to document themselves getting away with.
With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.
It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”
But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”
On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.
“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “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.”
Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.
“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”
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
Vehicles belonging to the motorcade of Brazilian right-wing Senator and former Liberal Party (PL) presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro are seen parked inside his condominium in Brasilia on October 26, 2026. Flavio Bolsonaro on October 26, 2026 said a Supreme Court justice had banned him from leaving Brazil, one day after he lost presidential elections and refused to concede defeat. (Photo by Pablo PORCIUNCULA / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
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.
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