Washington Refuses to Hold 405 Suspected Noncitizens' Ballots. Its Law Calls a DMV-Registered Noncitizen's Vote 'Authorized'

Washington's top election official told the Justice Department no on Wednesday. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, will not set aside ballots from 405 people federal prosecutors say are noncitizens who have already voted in the state, more than 1,500 times by their count.

In a letter sent Wednesday, the day of a noon federal deadline, Hobbs called the list "not reliable," said it includes U.S. citizens, and wrote that without "individualized proof of ineligibility, it would be both irresponsible and illegal for election officials to decline to process a registered voter's ballot." He lumped the request in with what he called the department's "recent acts of election interference in California, Alaska, and now in Washington." Ballots went out by Oct. 16. Election Day is Nov. 3.

That's the fight on the surface. Underneath it sits a Washington law almost nobody is talking about.

The law that excuses the vote

Washington signs people up to vote automatically when they deal with certain state offices, starting with the driver's license counter. The state's own law plans for what happens when that machine signs up someone who can't legally vote. RCW 29A.08.370 says that unless the person "willfully and knowingly votes," a noncitizen registered that way who then casts a ballot "is not guilty" under the state's illegal-voting statute and "shall be deemed to have performed an authorized act."

Read that twice. If the state's system registers you and you vote without knowing better, Washington law calls it authorized. That's exactly the group prosecutors describe. Their Oct. 26 letter says many of the 405 are green card holders who got registered through the state's motor-voter program and then simply received a ballot in the mail. "People are telling us, 'I got a ballot in the mail, I thought I was eligible to vote,'" Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd said at Monday's news conference.

Jason Rantz, the Seattle Red host who first broke the 405 figure, put it plainly:

Federal law is another matter. Voting in a federal election as a noncitizen is a federal crime no matter how you got on the rolls, and the same Washington law requires that an ineligible person's registration, "or record of vote," be removed once it's found. Floyd also says the state can't catch these cases on its own because it doesn't collect immigration status at all.

A door that closed in September

Hobbs says the right path is the state's voter-challenge process. Here's the catch his letter skips. Under RCW 29A.08.820, a regular challenge must be filed at least 45 days before the election. For Nov. 3, that was Sept. 19. Only a registered voter in the same county or the county prosecutor can file one, the challenger needs "personal knowledge," and each voter takes a separate form. A challenge filed after a voter's ballot arrives "cannot affect the current election."

Think of a store that says you can return a defective product, but only by mail, only with the original receipt, and only before you bought it. Federal prosecutors aren't on the list of people allowed to file, and the deadline passed five weeks before they handed over the names.

What Hobbs says, and what he doesn't

Hobbs makes real points. The list came as a PDF of a printed spreadsheet with no voter ID numbers or addresses. It had duplicate entries. It gave Election Day as Nov. 2. His office says some of the people on it aren't currently registered or are on inactive status. And the prosecutors' own letter admits some of the 405 may have become citizens since they registered. That's the reason they asked the state to check before counting, not after.

But the letter leaves big questions open. Hobbs says "many" on the list are citizens and that more "almost certainly" are. He doesn't say how many. His office told KOMO News it's too soon to give a number. If the state could find the citizens in two days, it hasn't said how many it found who aren't, or whether it will pull their registrations as its own law requires.

He also leans on two federal laws. One is the 90-day quiet period in the National Voter Registration Act. That rule bars programs that "systematically remove" voters close to an election. Prosecutors asked to hold specific ballots, not purge the rolls. The other is the Voting Rights Act, which forbids refusing to count the vote of someone "qualified to vote." A noncitizen isn't qualified to vote in a federal election. The whole dispute is who has to prove what before Tuesday.

Hobbs has said Washington recorded only 15 cases of noncitizen voting from 1982 to 2025. Floyd says that low number reflects a state that never looked. "Up until now, no one checked," he told Rantz on Monday.

Why it matters

Washington races can turn on a handful of votes. Christine Gregoire won the 2004 governor's race by 129 votes after a hand recount. Prosecutors say their 405 names alone cast more than 1,500 ballots over the years, and they call it "only the tip of the iceberg," with a second list coming from Homeland Security.

What's next

The prosecutors' Oct. 26 letter warned that if the state didn't act by noon Wednesday, the United States would have "no choice but to seek emergency relief" in federal court. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, Emily Langlie, said Floyd and Serrano received Hobbs's letter and "will take some time to review it and decide next steps."

That clock is short. Once a ballot is counted, there's no pulling it back. The question now is whether a federal judge gets the case before Washington's counties start tallying.