Federal prosecutors announced Monday that investigators have identified 405 people they believe are not U.S. citizens who voted in Washington state elections, with those individuals casting a combined total of more than 1,500 ballots across multiple election cycles.
Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said his office has sent the names to state election officials and asked them to hold any ballots tied to those voters until their citizenship status can be confirmed.
Floyd said he’s confident the true scope of the problem extends well beyond what investigators have documented so far.
Through our investigation, we have confirmed with high confidence that non-citizens are voting in the state of Washington in federal and state elections. Thus far, we have identified over 400 non-citizens who have voted in Washington, and many of them have voted multiple times. That means we have identified over 1,500 ballots illegally cast. This is not the full number of non-citizens who have been voting in Washington. This is only the tip of the iceberg. With a small sample that we have collected so far, I’m confident that we are looking at thousands of non-citizens who have been voting in Washington.
Floyd did not offer a statewide figure to back up his estimate of thousands of noncitizen voters. The 1,500 ballots his office cited were reportedly cast over the span of several decades, according to a report on the investigation.
The announcement lands just days before the November 3 midterm elections.
How the probe was conducted
Floyd said Department of Homeland Security investigators cross-referenced publicly available Washington voter rolls against federal records to flag registered voters they suspect are not citizens, then checked whether those individuals had actually cast ballots.
He said the work required multiple verification steps to confirm records belonged to the same person, slowing the process considerably.
That slowdown, Floyd said, is compounded by Washington’s refusal to hand over its complete voter registration database, including personal identifying information tied to each voter.
Washington has refused to share the complete list of registered voters with identifying information. We are having to do this essentially one person at a time. If we had access to the full database maintained by Washington, this could be done much more efficiently. We could simply compare Washington’s information to ours and it would yield immediate results.
Floyd said his office intends to pursue criminal charges against noncitizens who vote illegally as well as anyone who knowingly assists them in doing so.
Part of a broader pattern
The Washington findings follow similar disputes playing out elsewhere. Last week, officials in Los Angeles County told a court they are unable to independently verify voters’ citizenship beyond the self-attestation provided on registration forms.
In California, the Justice Department has sued to block the state from counting mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters federal officials have identified as likely noncitizens, pending verification of their eligibility. California officials have pushed back against the evidence underlying that list.
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