Federal prosecutors gave Washington state 48 hours to review a list of 405 registered voters and set aside any ballots they cast until their citizenship is confirmed. The election is Nov. 3. One record on the list dates to 1994.
Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, and Pete Serrano, his counterpart for the Western District, say the 405 people are noncitizens who registered and voted, and that “more than 1,500 ballots have been illegally cast.” The list came from the Department of Homeland Security, matched against public voter registration data. Many of those named are green-card holders, the Justice Department says, who are lawfully in the country but cannot vote. Neither prosecutor has been confirmed by the Senate.
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who runs the state’s elections, called the timing “no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.” He warned that the system the list comes from “mistakenly flags legitimate U.S. citizens as noncitizens.” The 1994 entry, he noted, predates “113 million primary and general election ballots” cast in the state since.
He put the scale in numbers: “From 1982 to 2025, there have been 15 instances of non-citizens voting in the state of Washington. That is .0000006%.” The state has more than 5.1 million registered voters.
Who a citizenship list can reach
Nothing released so far shows the race of the people on the list, and the Justice Department has not said how many are naturalized citizens. What is known is who a citizenship match touches. A person who became a citizen after a federal record was created can still look like a noncitizen in an old file. Black immigrants number 5.6 million in the United States, 11.4% of the Black population, according to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of 2024 data, and a quarter of Black people are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Black voters from families that came from Haiti, Nigeria, Jamaica, Ethiopia or Somalia are part of the electorate any such challenge can reach.
The Washington demand follows the same move in California. As CBS News reported, the Justice Department sued to block counting of mail ballots from 20,000 alleged noncitizens there, and an appeals court dismissed the administration’s emergency request Monday night. CBS also reported that 27 of the 30 lawsuits the administration filed against states over voter rolls have been dismissed by federal judges.
The 48 hours run out Wednesday.
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