Trump Says He Will Accept Midterm Results 'If They're Honest' as Justice Department Threatens Washington Over 400 Voters

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 the state authorities running the 3 November contest.

Asked by reporters on Tuesday whether he would respect the outcome even if his Republican Party loses control of the US Congress, Trump said he would if they were honest elections.

A day earlier, the 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.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday that the timing of the request, one week before the general election, was no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results. The letter 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office said it was reviewing the list of 400 alleged noncitizens, but had already found some of them to be based on outdated information; for instance, the DOJ was citing a record from 1994 to claim one person was a noncitizen, Hobbs said.

Hobbs said in the statement that 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.

Last month, 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 face the demand from the Trump administration and have courts side with it.

Despite the court setbacks, Trump's DOJ has continued trying to cast suspicion on the 3 November elections, in particular by attempting to claim large numbers of noncitizens are voting in Democratic-led states, a claim repeatedly dismissed by bipartisan voting rights groups.

Last week, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Alaska, saying it would seek to block certification of its Senate election if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, did not win. The DOJ said that because another candidate also named Dan Sullivan was allowed on the ballot, local authorities were failing to fairly run the election; on the ballot, Senator Dan Sullivan appears with information indicating he is the incumbent.

Earlier this month, California said it had received a DOJ letter 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 plans to deploy a record number of election observers across the country on 3 November to watch for irregularities, despite objections from local officials in several Democratic-led states, including New Jersey and California.