A week before the Nov. 3 general election, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Washington state not to verify or count ballots submitted by 405 registered voters until their citizenship could be confirmed. Federal prosecutors say these people, many of whom may be green-card holders, have collectively cast more than 1,500 ballots in past elections. The office of Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said it was reviewing the letter but called it a belated intervention that could wrongly disenfranchise U.S. citizens.
The letter was sent to Hobbs on Oct. 26, a Monday, when Washington’s vote-by-mail period was already in its tenth day. Nearly the entire state election system is built around mail-in ballots and drop boxes: voters automatically receive a ballot, sign a declaration on the envelope, and county officials compare the signature with the one on file in the voter registration database. Federal officials now want ballots from people on their list to be set aside until the review is complete.
Charles Neil Floyd, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said the list was only the beginning of an investigation. Along with Pete Serrano, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, he said the department had identified more than 400 noncitizens who had registered and voted in the state multiple times. The Justice Department has not released their names, its method for matching records, or evidence in any individual case.
Only U.S. citizens may vote in federal elections; the rule also applies to permanent residents with green cards. Prosecutors say some such residents may have ended up on the voter rolls through the registration system and, after receiving a ballot by mail, mistaken it as confirmation that they were eligible to vote. But according to the state, Washington’s official automatic voter registration system is used during transactions in which a person has already provided proof of U.S. citizenship, such as when applying for an enhanced driver’s license or identification card.
Washington requires every voter registering to swear under oath that they are a U.S. citizen. Their personal information is checked against records held by the Department of Licensing and the Social Security Administration. The state also has a separate process for voters whose registration is pending: their ballots must not be counted until their identity has been confirmed. But citizenship is a more complicated question, particularly when a federal database records a person’s status at a particular point in their immigration history, and they may have become a naturalized citizen in the years since registering.
Hobbs pointed to this very risk. His office said the system used by the Justice Department regularly classifies people who have since become U.S. citizens as noncitizens. One of the 405 records on the federal list, the secretary of state said, dates back to 1994. Since then, 113.5 million ballots have been cast in Washington primaries and general elections; in that context, Hobbs described cases of illegal voting, including by noncitizens, as extremely rare.
The dispute is not just about 405 names, but also about who has the authority to set the rules in the final days of a campaign. Hobbs’s office noted that federal law restricts the removal of voters from registration rolls during the 90 days before a federal election, and that elections are administered by the states. It also pointed to the Justice Department’s recent unsuccessful effort to obtain Washington’s full, unredacted voter registration database, which contains confidential information.
The request in Washington follows a similar initiative by Donald Trump’s administration in California, where the Justice Department sought to set aside ballots from about 20,000 people it considered likely noncitizens. A federal appeals court did not immediately grant the government’s request and sent the dispute back to a lower court. No lawsuit has yet been filed in Washington. The next step depends on Hobbs’s response and whether the state can review the federal list without turning suspicion into a refusal to count ballots already cast.
Based on: Trump’s DOJ demands WA set aside ballots of 400-plus alleged noncitizens