Ballots Seized – Citizens Flagged

Hand casting a vote into a ballot box. — Photo: Shutterstock

The Justice Department says more than 400 people voted illegally in Washington state elections, but the state’s own election chief says some of those names belong to U.S. citizens.

Quick Take

The Department of Justice (DOJ) says it found over 400 noncitizens registered to vote in Washington who cast about 1,500 ballots in past elections.
Federal prosecutors asked the state to set aside those ballots until citizenship can be confirmed.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs says some people on the list are already U.S. citizens, and some aren’t even registered voters.
The request landed just weeks before the midterm election, raising questions about timing.
A nearly identical fight is playing out in California over 20,000 ballots, pointing to a wider federal push.

What The Justice Department Says It Found

The Justice Department announced on October 26 that it identified over 400 noncitizens registered to vote in Washington, many of them lawful permanent residents, or green card holders. The agency said these individuals had voted in multiple elections, totaling roughly 1,500 ballots cast. Two U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the state, covering both the Western and Eastern districts, jointly brought the claim forward.

Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd called the findings “the tip of the iceberg,” a phrase meant to signal a bigger problem lurking in the data. But Floyd also admitted federal investigators do not actually have Washington’s official voting records for the people on the list, an acknowledgment that undercuts how solid the claim currently stands.

The Request To Hold Ballots Until Citizenship Is Confirmed

Rather than announcing charges, the Justice Department sent a letter to Secretary of State Hobbs asking the state to segregate the vote-by-mail ballots tied to the flagged names. The idea is to pause those ballots until officials can verify whether each person was actually eligible to vote. No criminal charges have been filed, and officials have said it’s too early to know if any will be.

Washington Pushes Back With Specific Names

Hobbs didn’t simply question the methodology in general terms. He said directly that some people on the federal list are U.S. citizens, and others aren’t even on Washington’s voter rolls at all. His office also flagged that one of the 405 records dated back to 1994, a voting history so old it raises doubts about how current and relevant the entire dataset really is.

Washington’s Secretary of State office went further, saying the matching system the Justice Department often relies on “frequently flags legitimate U.S. citizens as noncitizens,” a problem that could put real voters’ rights at risk if ballots are pulled based on faulty data. That’s a specific, named rebuttal, not just vague doubt, and it deserves serious weight before anyone treats the 400-person list as settled fact.

A Pattern Playing Out Beyond Washington

Washington isn’t an isolated case. Around the same time, federal officials asked a court to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters in California under a similar noncitizen-voting theory, a dispute that reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just weeks before Election Day. The parallel timing suggests a coordinated federal strategy to scrutinize voter rolls nationwide, not a one-off Washington investigation.

Context matters here. Research from the Brennan Center for Justice, reviewing 42 jurisdictions and 23.5 million votes cast in 2016, found only about 30 suspected cases of noncitizen voting, a rate of roughly 0.0001 percent. That doesn’t mean the Washington allegations are wrong. It does mean a list of 400 names, built from database matching rather than individual records, deserves careful verification before anyone calls it proof of widespread fraud.

What Happens Next

Washington’s election officials say they’ll only hand over protected voter information through lawful process, not simply because the federal government asked. That sets up a standoff just as ballots are already being counted. Conservatives are right to want every illegal vote caught and every ineligible registration removed. But getting it right matters just as much as moving fast, especially when real citizens’ ballots hang in the balance.