Justice Department Tells Washington State to Set Aside Ballots From 400-Plus Alleged Noncitizens

The Justice Department has told Washington state election officials to set aside ballots cast by more than 400 registered voters the department says may not be citizens, a demand delivered eight days before the Nov. 3 general election. The request, sent in a letter Monday to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs and announced at a news conference in Seattle, is the latest in a string of similar federal actions aimed at state voter rolls as Republicans try to hold narrow majorities in Congress.

Charles Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, told reporters his office had identified "over 400 noncitizens who are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections" in the state, and that those voters had cast roughly 1,500 ballots combined over several election cycles. Floyd said the finding was made "with high confidence" but did not release the underlying evidence, and he described the sample his office reviewed as "only the tip of the iceberg" of a voter roll that includes more than 5 million registered Washingtonians. One flagged registration record dates to 1994. The department has separately acknowledged that some people on its list may since have become naturalized citizens.

Part of a Wider Campaign

Washington is not the only state facing this kind of pressure. The Justice Department sued California over similar allegations involving roughly 20,000 voters it labeled "likely" noncitizens, seeking a court order to stop those ballots from being counted; a federal appeals court declined on Monday to grant the administration's request for an injunction bypassing a district court review, sending that fight back to a lower judge. A comparable department claim in Nevada involved about 16,000 people. According to Washington's attorney general's office, more than two dozen courts nationwide have already rejected Justice Department demands for confidential, unredacted state voter registration lists, and a separate federal suit the department brought against Hobbs over Washington's voter data was dismissed last month.

President Trump has long asserted that noncitizen voting is widespread, though independent research on the subject, including studies from the Migration Policy Institute, has found no evidence that noncitizens vote in significant numbers. Noncitizen voting is already a felony under both federal and Washington law, punishable by prosecution and deportation.

Washington Pushes Back

Hobbs's office said it is reviewing the Justice Department's list but will not hand over protected voter information without due process. "We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process," Hobbs said, adding that the timing of the request, a week before the election, was "no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results." Hobbs also said his office could not say where the department's list originated and that it had fielded roughly 60 federal subpoenas for voter records over the past month, some targeting people who were citizens and others who were not even on the state's rolls.

Under Washington's vote-by-mail system, eligible residents are automatically registered when they obtain or renew a driver's license, a process tied to citizenship checks against state licensing and Social Security Administration records; mismatched registrations are flagged as provisional and those ballots go uncounted until the voter supplies valid identification. Hobbs's office has reported just 15 verified instances of noncitizen voting in Washington between 1982 and 2025, a rate it calculates at roughly 0.000006% of ballots cast. Federal law also restricts systematic voter-roll purges in the 90 days before a federal election, a limit the department's letter does not address.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said the administration "has put the weight of the federal government behind the same lies" that fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, calling a related federal lawsuit against California "part of the President's inquisition against American democracy."

Brown made the remarks in a news release announcing that he is leading a 20-state coalition, joined by the District of Columbia, in an amicus brief backing California against the department's lawsuit there, a filing first reported locally alongside the Washington ballot request. The brief argues that the Constitution gives states, not the executive branch, authority to administer elections within the framework Congress has set, that the lawsuit alleges no actual violation of existing voter-list-maintenance law, and that a win for the department would risk disenfranchising eligible voters and creating confusion for election officials nationwide. Washington's secretary of state has separately noted on a page tracking federal actions affecting state elections that the state is not required to turn over its voter list to the federal government to receive mailed ballots for the Nov. 3 election, after a federal judge blocked a related executive order in June.

Who Is Affected, and What Comes Next

The immediate effect falls on the roughly 400 flagged voters, whose ballots could sit in limbo while the state reviews the department's claims, and on county election staff already processing a high-turnout midterm with control of Congress at stake. Floyd said his office has spoken with some of the flagged voters, who told agents they received ballots in the mail and believed themselves eligible to vote. He declined to say whether any prosecutions were planned but said "anyone who assists someone in voting illegally would also be guilty of that crime," and the department has said it expects to send Washington another list of suspected noncitizen registrants before Election Day.

No lawsuit has yet been filed against Washington, unlike in California and Nevada, and the letter sets no explicit deadline or stated consequence if the state declines to act. Hobbs's office says its review will continue to focus on whether any individual request complies with state and federal confidentiality law, and it has reiterated that it will not release protected voter data outside that process. The broader legal fight over similar demands in California remains before a federal district court, and how that case is resolved is likely to shape whether the Justice Department pursues further action in Washington once the state's ballots are counted and certified after Nov. 3.