Federal prosecutors in Washington state have asked election officials to temporarily withhold ballots linked to more than 400 registered voters suspected of being non-US citizens, intensifying the Trump administration’s scrutiny of voter registration records ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
Neil Floyd, acting US attorney in Seattle, and Pete Serrano, the chief federal prosecutor for eastern Washington, said the individuals identified by the Justice Department could include green-card holders who are legally resident in the country but are not eligible to vote in federal elections.
The prosecutors alleged that some of the individuals had participated in several elections, with Floyd estimating that more than 1,500 ballots may have been illegally cast.
“This is not the full number of noncitizens who have been voting in Washington,” Floyd said. “This is only the tip of the iceberg.”
In a letter sent on Monday to Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, the prosecutors said they had supplied his office with a list of 405 people whom the Justice Department believes were registered to vote unlawfully.
They requested that any ballots submitted by the individuals be kept separate from other votes until their citizenship status could be verified.
According to the letter, information from the Department of Homeland Security indicated that some of the people on the list had voted as recently as the August primaries. Others had reportedly participated in elections in Washington for more than a decade, with some voting on over 24 occasions.
The prosecutors also said the Homeland Security Department was expected to provide another list of suspected noncitizen voters soon, which would subsequently be shared with state election authorities.
Floyd and Serrano gave Hobbs until Wednesday, a deadline of 48 hours, to examine the records, establish whether the individuals were US citizens and instruct election officials not to count any ballots received from those whose eligibility remained unconfirmed.
They warned that failure to comply could lead the federal government to seek urgent court intervention.
“If you cannot implement this process by then, given the ongoing federal election, the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief,” they wrote.
Hobbs confirmed receipt of the letter but questioned the reliability of the information provided by the Justice Department.
He said one of the records dated back to 1994 and noted that more than 113 million ballots had been cast in primary and general elections since then.
In a statement, the secretary of state said his office would protect voters’ information and respond only to requests that complied with due process.
“We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed,” Hobbs said.
He also questioned the timing of the request, which came about a week before the election, saying it appeared intended to create unwarranted doubts about the credibility of the results.
The latest dispute follows an earlier legal battle between Washington state and the Trump administration over access to the state’s complete voter registration records.
Last year, the Justice Department requested the unredacted voter list, which contains information such as names, addresses, driver’s licence numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Hobbs declined to release the records, prompting the administration to sue.
A federal judge dismissed that lawsuit last month.
The Trump administration has also pursued similar cases in 30 other states and the District of Columbia in an effort to obtain full voter registration lists. Federal judges have dismissed 27 of those lawsuits, while three cases remain pending. One case against Oklahoma was voluntarily withdrawn.
Floyd said federal officials relied on a publicly available voter registration list after Washington refused to provide its unredacted records. The Department of Homeland Security then compared the list with government databases to identify people it believed were not citizens, before investigating whether they had voted.
However, Hobbs’ office warned that the process could wrongly identify eligible US citizens as noncitizens, potentially putting their voting rights at risk.
Although federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in US elections, cases of such voting are rare.
Hobbs said election officials should prioritise ensuring that eligible voters’ ballots are counted, particularly as thousands of Washington voters were already facing possible ballot rejection because of delayed postmarks.
The dispute mirrors a similar move by the Justice Department in California earlier this month, when federal officials asked election authorities to separate mail-in ballots linked to approximately 20,000 registered voters suspected of being noncitizens.
After California officials did not comply with its demand, the Justice Department sued Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, asking a federal court to prevent the ballots from being counted until the voters’ citizenship status was verified.
A hearing on that request was scheduled for Tuesday. Meanwhile, a separate attempt by the Trump administration to obtain an emergency order from a federal appeals court was dismissed on Monday night.
Unlike the California case, the Justice Department had not filed a lawsuit against Washington state as of Monday, relying instead on its letter requesting that the ballots linked to the 405 individuals be set aside pending verification
