United States President Donald Trump said he would respect the results of next week’s midterm elections if they were “honest,” as his administration expanded a legal battle to assert power over state authorities running the highly-watched contest on November 3.
“I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded to reporters on Tuesday when asked if he will respect the outcome even if his Republican Party loses control of the US Congress.
Trump’s remarks came a day after his Department of Justice (DOJ) threatened the northwestern state of Washington with legal action if it did not remove around 400 people it claims are not US citizens from its voter registration rolls.
“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, addressing the request received in a letter that gave the state until Wednesday at noon local time to respond, or face what the DOJ called “emergency relief”.
Hobbs’s office said it was reviewing the list of 400 alleged noncitizens, but had already found some of them to be based on outdated information. The DOJ was citing a record from 1994, for instance, to claim one person was a noncitizen on its list, Hobbs said.
“Washington elections are secure. Cases of voter fraud, including noncitizen voting, are incredibly rare, and every voter attests to their eligibility by signing the declaration on their ballot return envelope in every election,” Hobbs said in the statement.
Last month, the state of Washington successfully argued in a lawsuit that it was not obligated to turn over its entire voter list to the DOJ. It was among dozens of Democrat-led states to have faced the demand from the Trump administration and had courts side with it.
Despite the setbacks in court, Trump’s DOJ has continued to try and cast suspicion on the outcome of the November 3 elections, in particular by attempting to claim large numbers of noncitizens are voting in Democratic-led states, a claim that has been repeatedly dismissed by bipartisan voting rights groups.
Last week, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the state of Alaska, saying it would seek to block certification of its Senate election if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, did not win. The DOJ said because the state was allowing another candidate who was also named Dan Sullivan to appear on the ballot, local authorities were failing in their responsibility to fairly run the election. On the ballot, Senator Dan Sullivan appears with information indicating that he is the incumbent.
The Senate race is one of several around the country that could go the way of the Democratic Party and see Trump’s Republicans lose control of the legislative body. On Friday, Trump said he personally had told the DOJ to file the lawsuit against Alaska.
Earlier this month, California said it had received a letter from the DOJ saying the state must review a list of around 20,000 noncitizen voters. California authorities said a large percentage of those on the list were in fact people who appeared to have been born in the US, which would automatically make them eligible voters.
The DOJ has also said it is planning to deploy a record number of election observers across the country on November 3 to watch for any irregularities, despite the objection of local officials in several Democratic-led states, including New Jersey and California. Historically, the DOJ has sent observers to watch for issues at places with a record of civil rights violations and obstacles that would keep minorities or disenfranchised groups from the polls on Election Day.
