A coalition of Democrats is suing to prevent the Trump administration from allegedly imposing itself on state-run elections and threatening to prosecute local election officials, setting up yet another legal showdown less than two weeks before Election Day.
The Democratic National Committee, its congressional and Senate campaign arms, a handful of high-profile lawmakers and others filed the suit late Tuesday in Washington, D.C., federal court.
Their complaint asks a federal judge to block the Trump administration’s alleged attempts to force states to remove voters from registration lists, segregate certain ballots and “threaten state and local election officials for doing nothing more than their lawful duties.”
ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment.
The Justice Department has repeatedly defended its actions as part of an effort to ensure the integrity of the election system.
The Trump administration has tangled with officials in California, Nevada and other states over allegations of noncitizen voting in recent weeks. The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have accused several states of knowingly harboring noncitizens on their voter rolls and refusing to collaborate to remove them.
In court papers filed Tuesday, two officials in the Los Angeles County registrar’s office delivered the results of their “preliminary analysis” of 200 individuals from the DOJ’s list of some 20,000 accused of being ineligible to vote.
Of those 200 individuals, officials said, nearly 40% “indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship; and 71.2% of the records have no voting history.”
In a statement to ABC News on Tuesday, DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels accused California of “willful blindness.”
“California cannot facilitate the violation of federal law,” Pels said. “We notified California that noncitizens are likely registered to vote, and we asked the state to independently verify the citizenship of any ballots cast by people on a list that we provided. It refused to do so. Federal law doesn’t permit this willful blindness.”
States claim the administration’s steps — taken just weeks before the midterms — reflect federal overreach and are meant to sow distrust in the outcome of the election.
The Democrats’ suit slams the administration for pressuring states to purge their voter registration lists of illegal voters using “shoddily compiled lists of supposed noncitizens—target lists that have crumbled upon the barest inspection.”
“For over a decade now, President Donald J. Trump has bombarded the American people with lies and misinformation about American elections and voter fraud,” the suit says. “While these lies have been debunked at every turn, that has never deterred the President from employing them as a pretext to seize control over elections, even as courts overwhelmingly reject that effort.”
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