I often say: filing a lawsuit is easy, winning it is hard.

To bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff files a complaint — a short, plain statement describing what the case is about, why the court has jurisdiction, and what relief is sought. The plaintiff then obtains a summons and serves the complaint on the defendant.

Service can get tricky when defendants are located overseas or in hiding. But in voting rights cases, where the defendant is a state government, it's simple.

Simple, that is, unless you are the Department of Justice.

Regular readers of Democracy Docket know that the DOJ has sued 30 states, plus the District of Columbia, for access to their unredacted voter rolls. One of those states was Washington. From the start, the Washington lawsuit struggled.

The DOJ had 90 days to serve the state of Washington. The good news for the DOJ is that the state was not hiding or evading service. It was simply being a state — office buildings, lawyers and government officials with titles. In my experience, it’s a friendly state. People respond to email and return phone calls.

Even better for the DOJ: it has an entire office full of experts serving in Washington State. The U.S. Attorney's office is part of the Department of Justice, and nearly every lawyer in it is licensed to practice law in Washington. 

Better still, Washington State had reached out and offered to waive service of process — a procedure allowed under the federal rules and applicable everywhere in the country. No special knowledge of the Washington State government was required.

As Washington State's secretary of state noted: "We would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to know how to properly file a lawsuit in federal court."

Clearly, the secretary's office expected too much.

Meeting the 90-day deadline proved beyond DOJ's reach. When a federal judge stepped in to demand an explanation for why the administration had failed to meet this basic requirement, things got even stranger.

First, the DOJ claimed it had already served Secretary of State Steve Hobbs — though it turned out they had served a woman identified only as "Mia Doe" at an address that did not belong to Hobbs. When Hobbs' legal team offered to waive service, a different DOJ attorney — one who had not previously been involved in the case — continued trying, and failing, to serve Hobbs.

Finally, on Monday, Eric Neff, the Acting Chief of the DOJ's Voting Section, stepped forward and took full responsibility: "The unsuccessful efforts for timely service were spearheaded solely by myself." He attributed his failure "primarily to my unfamiliarity with service of process procedures on state officials in Washington State."

This is remarkable. The head of the entire Voting Section did not know how to serve a complaint? And he was personally, and apparently alone, attempting to do so?

Neff went on to claim that the Voting Section "has successfully served all other lawsuits of this nature in all other jurisdictions." This is not much of a boast. Serving a lawsuit is not an achievement. It requires filling out some paperwork and following a few basic rules.

Even that modest claim doesn't hold up. In Massachusetts, the elections chief has said he wasn't properly served. In Oklahoma, before even reaching the question of service, the DOJ wasted months sending emails to election officials at the wrong addresses.

These are not isolated incidents. DOJ lawyers have cited statutes that do not exist, filed documents containing unresolved internal edits, and sent legal demands to the wrong people. And last Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon — head of the Civil Rights Division — shared a social media post that inadvertently revealed a federal probe into Ohio State's College of Medicine.

None of this should surprise us. After Attorney General Pam Bondi took the reins at DOJ, career attorneys left in droves. What remains is a department stocked with the Eric Neffs of the world — lawyers who may lack the skills and experience of those they replaced, but who more than compensate with their ideological devotion to MAGA.

In the end, all of Neff's pleading worked. The judge declined to dismiss the case, opting instead to "resolve cases on their merits." However, that doesn't erase the mistake.

I am of two minds about how this ended. On one hand, the DOJ has lost every voter roll case that has reached a decision on the merits — so why not let the judge add Washington State to that list? On the other hand, I can't help feeling that this again illustrates the special treatment DOJ lawyers receive that the rest of us simply do not.

Either way, the DOJ will have its day in court. But as I said at the outset: Filing a case is easy. Winning it is something else entirely.

Now, here's some joy from one of our pawtners in the opposition movement.