Washington election officials announced that a preliminary review of a federal list of more than 400 presumed non-citizen voters has already revealed the presence of U.S. citizens, inactive voters and people who are not currently registered. The revelation renews concerns about the accuracy of the Trump administration’s growing efforts to identify allegedly ineligible voters.
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs (D) disclosed the findings Wednesday in a scathing response to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which this week threatened legal action unless Washington stops processing ballots linked to people on a list provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
“A preliminary investigation confirms what your letter acknowledges: this list includes U.S. citizens and is unreliable,” Hobbs wrote. He said refusing to process a registered voter’s ballot without individualized proof of ineligibility would be “both irresponsible and illegal.”
The DOJ letter said DHS identified more than 400 people who federal officials said were or had been noncitizens and who, “with a high level of confidence,” had voted in Washington’s elections. The department asked Hobbs to review the list within 24 hours and, if a registered voter returned a ballot, to ask election officials not to verify it or compile it until citizenship could be determined. The DOJ threatened to seek emergency aid if Washington did not comply.
But Hobbs said the state’s initial review quickly revealed multiple problems.
A “significant number” of people on the federal list are either not currently registered or are inactive registered, he wrote, contradicting the DOJ’s suggestion that all would receive ballots in the 2026 election. Washington also identified “many” people on the list as U.S. citizens and warned that those already found could be just the “tip of the iceberg” of voters who would be unfairly disenfranchised if the state followed the DOJ’s request.
Hobbs also sharply criticized the quality of the DOJ’s submission.
He said federal officials provided no explanation for how the data was collected, identified no underlying sources and provided no supporting documentation. The list arrived as a PDF containing a printed spreadsheet rather than a usable electronic file, omitting fields such as voter ID numbers and addresses that could make matching easier, and included duplicate entries.
The DOJ letter also incorrectly stated that Election Day was November 2. The election will take place on November 3.
“Fundamental factual errors like this are unacceptable and risk confusing voters,” Hobbs wrote.
Hobbs also argued that withholding ballots based solely on an unverified federal list could itself violate federal law, pointing to the Voting Rights Act’s protections against refusing to count qualified voters’ ballots and the National Voter Registration Act’s restrictions on systematic voter removal within 90 days of a federal election.
He called on the DOJ to provide individualized evidence against any voter it deems ineligible.
“But these processes require evidence, not just allegations,” Hobbs wrote, urging federal officials to reconsider what he called their “deeply flawed data” rather than take last-minute legal action against the state.
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