‘Counsel apologizes to the court’: In biggest mistake yet, DOJ blows filing deadline in voter roll case, begs court’s forgiveness

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has once again tripped over the basics of litigation in its relentless quest for state voter registration records, blowing a deadline to properly serve Washington’s secretary of state with its lawsuit.

In a filing Monday, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, said miscommunication with local U.S. attorneys led to the complaint being sent to the wrong addresses. Neff said he then mistook a separate court order in the case — demanding to know why Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs had not yet been properly served — as an extension of the service deadline. 

Neff begged the court to forgive his mistake. “The United States acknowledges that it should have filed a motion for extension of time from this Court and requested additional time to serve Defendant,” Neff wrote. “Counsel apologizes to the Court for not having sought a timely extension.” 

Under federal rules of civil procedure, a plaintiff has 90 days to serve a defendant with the complaint initiating a lawsuit after filing it with the court. Failure to do so can lead to the lawsuit’s dismissal without prejudice — meaning the plaintiff can refile. 

Democracy Docket first reported on the improper service back in December, when the lawsuit was filed. 

“We would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to know how to properly file a lawsuit in federal court,” Hobbs’ office told Democracy Docket. “We would also expect them to follow official procedures of serving the complaint prior to reaching out to media outlets, considering the important nature of voter data.”

This wasn’t the first time this DOJ has failed to properly serve state election officials. The DOJ appeared to make a similar error in its lawsuit against Massachusetts.* Despite this, Neff averred “under penalty of perjury” in a declaration to the Washington district court accompanying Monday’s filing that “[m]y Section has successfully served all other lawsuits of this nature in all other jurisdictions successfully.”

Such mistakes may be inevitable when a decimated workforce attempts to procure voting records in every state. After Attorney General Pam Bondi took office, career DOJ attorneys fled by the hundreds and upwards of 75% left the Civil Rights Division as it shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to attacking them. 

Last year, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said she welcomed the exodus of experienced attorneys, and has repeatedly advertised openings at the office on social media posts and urging inexperienced, but ideologically aligned, lawyers to apply.

Neff was one of those new hires, eventually replacing Maureen Riorden — another election denier who worked with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, who nonetheless had considerable experience in the Voting Section — as the Voting Section’s acting chief. Before the DOJ, Neff was a Los Angeles County prosecutor who brought flawed charges based on a conspiracy theory pushed by election deniers. That mistake ended up costing L.A. taxpayers $5 million in a settlement.  

At the same time, the office has sued 29 states and Washington D.C. for their voting rolls.

Neff argued in Monday’s filing that the workload meant he had a “justifiable excuse” for the failed service.

“The United States instituted multiple related actions across the country and is coordinating these actions out of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Voting Section,” he wrote. “Litigating in multiple jurisdictions presents unique challenges to navigate each District’s local rules and varying service requirements in each state.” 

So far, the DOJ’s machine gun litigation strategy hasn’t been working. To date, three courts have ruled against the DOJ on the merits; the agency is now appealing all three. Another court in Georgia dismissed the case without prejudice because the DOJ filed in the wrong jurisdiction — they made the same mistake in California, but the judge there decided to rule against the DOJ on the merits. 

Those are hardly the only legal errors. The DOJ’s filings have been riddled with typos, miscited statutes, and included undeleted drafting notes. The agency spent months emailing the wrong address in Oklahoma to demand voter rolls, and they sent demand letters to the wrong state officials in Rhode Island and Wisconsin.  

There have been less obvious mistakes, as well. Election law experts have questioned the strategy behind filing dozens of nearly identical lawsuits, some in jurisdictions with adverse case law. After Department of Homeland Security agents killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota, Bondi sent Governor Tim Walz a letter demanding access to the state’s voter rolls in exchange for ending the administration’s aggressive immigration tactics. A federal judge in Oregon later cited that letter in ruling against the DOJ’s voter roll demands there.

Federal courts can essentially forgive a technical error in serving a complaint when the defendant is clearly aware of the lawsuit, and even if the case is dismissed, the DOJ could refile. So while the mistake is unlikely to doom the DOJ’s case, it is embarrassing. 

And the delays this filing fault has already caused could frustrate the raison d’etre for the DOJ’s demands for state’s unredacted voter rolls — forcing election officials to purge their voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.  

Maya Bodinson contributed to this report. 

*Massachusetts Alliance for Retired Americans, an intervenor in this litigation, are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.