U.S. Justice Dept. is weighing more state election lawsuits before midterms

Attorney General Todd Blanche indicated that the Justice Department may sue additional states over elections ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, according to Bloomberg.

"There's a number of states that we're looking at," Blanche said Thursday while addressing journalists at an event in Virginia, according to Bloomberg. He said the department could end up in additional legal battles with states that opt out of cooperating on the administration's push to make election results more dependable.

A Justice Department official who is working on the department’s election cases said the department is weighing lawsuits against additional states, either ahead of the midterms or perhaps afterward, according to NBC News. The goal, NBC News reported, is to force states to audit their registration lists for noncitizens.

The department last week filed a complaint against California, alleging that more than 20,000 people likely to be noncitizens are registered to vote in the state. The department said California mails a ballot to every registered voter and did not review a list of names the federal government sent. The suit asks a court to bar California from tabulating vote-by-mail ballots from those people until their citizenship is verified.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement that the department's analysis is preliminary and that the review is ongoing.

Blanche also did not rule out that the department might try to stop states from finalizing their results, according to NBC News. "It is not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention to, improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process," he told reporters.

Blanche described a possible "doomsday" scenario in which the department would step into the certification work carried out by state and local officials. "To say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that .... of course, I'm not going to say that," he said, according to NBC News.

NBC News said federal law narrowly defines the department's part in elections, mostly covering civil rights protection and criminal cases against people who break election statutes. It said federal law gives the department no power to contest ballots or hold up certification, a job that belongs to state and local officials.

California officials called the department's earlier demand that they review a list of names legally baseless, according to ABC News. "California has robust state law requirements that only U.S. citizens can register to vote and that any non-eligible registrants are removed from the State's voter rolls," California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said, according to ABC News.

ABC News said it is unclear how many names on the department's list will prove to be noncitizens. Earlier, Nevada checked 185 people whom the Department of Homeland Security had tagged as possible noncitizens, and every one turned out to be a legal citizen, according to ABC News.