Washington secretary of state pushes back on Justice Department effort to flag suspected noncitizen voters
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Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs rejected a Justice Department list of 400 suspected noncitizen voters as unreliable, saying it may include many citizens and should not be used to block ballots without proof of ineligibility.
Washington’s chief election official told the Justice Department that a list of 400 people the federal government alleges are noncitizens registered to vote in the state is “not reliable” and includes “many” U.S. citizens. Steve Hobbs responded to a letter from federal prosecutors Neil Floyd and Pete Serrano, who asked that ballots from the suspected noncitizens be set aside until their citizenship could be verified, just over a week before the Nov. 3 elections.
Hobbs said a preliminary review found that many of the names on the list belong to citizens, and that the list also contains a significant number of individuals who are not currently registered or have inactive registrations. He wrote, “It is almost certain more people named on this list are also United States citizens; those already identified may just be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of individuals that would be wrongfully disenfranchised by the actions you request.”
The secretary warned that refusing to count ballots without individualized proof of ineligibility would be “both irresponsible and illegal,” adding that the Justice Department had not disclosed how the list was compiled. He noted that the list was provided as a PDF spreadsheet lacking voter ID numbers or addresses and included duplicate entries, suggesting it was “created in a rushed manner.”
The request follows similar claims by the Justice Department in California, where a judge recently rejected a demand to set aside thousands of ballots from alleged noncitizens, citing concerns about the government’s methodology. Floyd and Serrano had given Hobbs a 48-hour deadline to verify citizenship and direct election workers to withhold the ballots, warning of possible emergency relief if the deadline was missed.