Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon warned the election officers that they could be held criminally liable if they knowingly retain noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls or facilitate noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots

Jerry Cornfield and Jake Goldstein-Street
Washington State Standard

Federal authorities on Tuesday threatened Washington state election officials with criminal prosecution if they fail to prevent noncitizens from voting in this year’s federal elections.

In a seven-page letter, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon warned the election officers that they could be held criminally liable if they knowingly retain noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls or facilitate noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots.

Dhillon sent similar letters to several states. She’s giving Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and election officials elsewhere five days to respond with how each is complying with a slew of long-standing federal laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections.

Hobbs said his office is reviewing Dhillon’s request to determine its legality but added that the Department of Justice is “accelerating down a slippery slope of threatening personal legal action against election administrators.”

“Attempts to revive disproven claims of rigged elections will not deter election professionals from doing their job of overseeing accessible, accurate, auditable elections,” the Democratic secretary of state said in a statement late Tuesday.

The letter sets up the latest standoff between the Trump administration and Washington election officials. Trump has long railed against noncitizen voting without evidence, and sought state voter rolls to stave off electoral fraud, which is almost nonexistent. This despite election oversight being the purview of states and Congress.

Hobbs has repeatedly refused to provide the Trump administration with protected information included in voter data, like dates of birth, driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of social security numbers.

Washington is the subject of an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit for access to the state’s voter list, including sensitive personal information. Similar suits in other states have been tossed. A hearing on Washington’s request to dismiss the case here is set for August.

And this March, the president signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service not to provide mail-in or absentee ballots to states that don’t hand over lists of mail-in voters, an existential threat to Washington’s voting system. The order also threatened election officials with prosecution for providing ballots to ineligible voters. A federal judge last month blocked the executive action.

Postal Service officials were set to meet with Washington state lawmakers last month to discuss the order, but skipped the public hearing.

Dhillon heads up the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. In that role, she has frequently taken on Democrat-led states over various issues, including incarcerating transgender prisoners in women’s prisons, gun restrictions and antisemitism on college campuses.

In the latest letter to Hobbs, she justifies the threat of criminal prosecution by citing the National Voter Registration Act, which says an election officials who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process” can be held liable.

This report was first published by the Washington State Standard.