Federal prosecutors say more than 400 people illegally voted in Washington State elections, and they want those ballots frozen before anyone counts them.
Quick Take
- The Justice Department says it found over 400 noncitizens registered to vote in Washington, tied to roughly 1,500 ballots cast in past elections.
- Officials asked the state to set aside those voters’ mail-in ballots until citizenship can be confirmed.
- Washington’s Secretary of State pushed back, saying some names on the list belong to actual U.S. citizens.
- The fight is unfolding weeks before the midterm elections, with no criminal charges filed yet.
What the Justice Department Claims
The Department of Justice says federal data shows more than 400 noncitizens registered to vote in Washington, and that many of them cast ballots in multiple elections. The department’s public release states many of the flagged individuals are lawful permanent residents, people who hold green cards but are not citizens and therefore cannot legally vote under federal law.
Breaking: First Assistant US DOJ Attorneys for Washington state, Neil Floyd and Pete Serrano, announce that investigators have found over 400 cases of noncitizens voting in state and federal elections.
The DOJ prosecutors claim that WA state is refusing to cooperate and hand… pic.twitter.com/lDWgsmIgZF
— Katie Daviscourt đŸ“¸ (@KatieDaviscourt) October 26, 2026
Two U.S. Attorney’s Offices, covering the Western and Eastern Districts of Washington, jointly made the request. Prosecutors Neil Floyd and Pete Serrano publicly called on state election officials to segregate the group’s ballots while citizenship status gets checked. The move pairs two federal offices behind one claim, which adds weight compared to a single anonymous tip.
The requested fix is narrow on paper. Rather than demanding ballots get thrown out immediately, the department asked Washington to hold them aside until officials can verify whether each person was actually eligible to vote. That distinction matters. Segregating a ballot for review is very different from declaring someone guilty of voter fraud.
The Numbers Behind the Allegation
The Justice Department’s letter to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs cited approximately 1,500 votes cast across prior elections by the roughly 400 flagged individuals. That number sounds alarming, but a recorded vote in someone’s history does not automatically prove the ballot was illegal. It still depends on whether that person was a noncitizen at the time, and whether the registration itself was knowing or accidental.
Officials have not said whether criminal charges will follow. Investigators reportedly consider it too early to know if the evidence supports prosecutions or simply points to administrative errors in matching records across different government databases.
Washington Pushes Back on the List
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs did not accept the federal claim at face value. He said some people named on the Justice Department’s list are, in fact, U.S. citizens, and some were not even on Washington’s voter rolls to begin with. That is a serious credibility problem if even a fraction of the list is wrong.
Hobbs put it bluntly: “A lot of them, or some of them, actually have citizenship, so I don’t know where they’re getting their names from”. His office also flagged that the data-matching system federal investigators often use has a track record of mistakenly flagging legitimate citizens as noncitizens.
Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd added a notable admission of his own. He acknowledged that federal investigators did not actually have Washington’s official voting records for the people on the list. That gap raises a basic question: how solid is a voter-fraud claim built without the state’s own voting history to confirm it?
A Pattern Playing Out Beyond Washington
Washington is not alone. A nearly identical fight broke out in California, where federal officials sought to set aside ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens, a case that landed before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just weeks before Election Day. The timing and scale in both states suggest a coordinated federal push on noncitizen voting ahead of the midterms.
Research on past elections shows confirmed noncitizen voting happens, but rarely. A widely cited study of 42 jurisdictions covering 23.5 million votes in 2016 found only about 30 suspected cases, a rate of roughly 0.0001 percent. That context does not disprove the Washington allegations, but it explains why skepticism about large suspect lists is common and why matching errors deserve real scrutiny.
Verifying citizenship before a vote counts is a reasonable, common-sense goal that most Americans support. But a list built on flawed data risks punishing legal citizens while giving actual fraud cover to hide behind confusion. Washington and the Justice Department owe voters a clear, verified accounting before Election Day, not after.
Sources:
apnews.com, abcnews4.com, justice.gov, wjla.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, brennancenter.org, npr.org
