Donald Trump wants foreigners scrubbed off the voter rolls, but Democrat election bosses won’t even let his investigators see the full list.
They swear their elections run clean and the feds are chasing ghosts.
And one Trump prosecutor just came back with a number they can’t wave away.
Federal Investigators Found 405 Names and Kept Right on Counting
Neil Floyd, the acting US Attorney for the Western District of Washington, says federal investigators have identified 405 people they believe are not American citizens but voted in Washington elections anyway.
And these folks apparently didn’t stop at one trip to the ballot box.
Floyd says the group cast more than 1,500 ballots across a string of state and federal elections. According to his letter to the state, some of them kept voting for more than a decade, and many of them hold green cards.
Prosecutors haven’t charged anyone yet, and every person on that list keeps the presumption of innocence until a court says otherwise. But Floyd told reporters he expects charges, and his office plans to go after anyone who voted illegally along with anyone who knowingly helped them do it.
Floyd sent the names to Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, and asked the state to hold back any ballots those voters return in the November 3 midterm until officials confirm they can legally vote. The Justice Department also told Hobbs a second list is on its way before Election Day.
“This is not the full number of non-citizens who have been voting in Washington. This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Floyd said.
He didn’t stop there. “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 hasn’t released a statewide figure to back up that “thousands” estimate, and his critics will hammer him for it. But the reason he can’t produce one tells the whole story.
Steve Hobbs Locked the Door and Called It Privacy
Homeland Security investigators built the list the slow way. They pulled Washington’s publicly available voter lists, ran the names against federal immigration records, and then checked whether each flagged registrant actually returned a ballot. Every possible match needed several more checks to make sure both files described the same human being.
Hobbs could speed that process up overnight. He won’t.
“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,” Floyd said. “If we had access to the full database maintained by Washington, this could be done much more efficiently.”
Trump sued Hobbs to pry that voter file loose, and a federal judge tossed the case in September. Since then, by the count of Hobbs’ own office, the Justice Department has sent roughly 60 subpoenas for individual voter records. Picture a bank examiner who gets permission to audit the vault, but only by sliding one deposit slip at a time under a locked door.
Hobbs fired back with a statement. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process,” he said. “We see what’s happening in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”
Harassed. Asking a state to double-check 405 names before counting their ballots now apparently counts as harassment.
His office also noted that one of the records on the federal list dates back to 1994, and that Washington voters have cast 113.5 million primary and general election ballots since that year. “Washington elections are secure,” the office added.
Think about that defense for a second. A noncitizen vote cast in 1994 is still a noncitizen vote, and a record that sat untouched for three decades says more about who was minding the store than about the folks who finally found it. Stuffing 1,500 ballots inside a pile of 113.5 million makes them harder to spot. It doesn’t make them legal.
Now, federal databases aren’t flawless, and some people on Floyd’s list may have naturalized before they ever filled out a ballot. That’s a real possibility. But the cure for it is simple enough: hand over the file and let both sides check the same records side by side. Hobbs keeps refusing the one step that would settle the argument.
Washington’s Own Election Chief Rang This Alarm in 2016
Floyd saved his sharpest line for a question about who in Washington actually checks whether noncitizens are voting. “Sadly, the answer to those questions in Washington is no one,” he said.
Democrats will call that a cheap partisan shot. But a Washington Secretary of State said nearly the same thing in 2016.
That September, then-Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, admitted the problem out loud to a Seattle TV station. “We don’t have a provision in state law that allows us either county elections officials or the Secretary of State’s office to verify someone’s citizenship,” Wyman said.
Days later, Wyman wrote that a citizenship controversy that fall had “shined a bright light on the fact that under current state law, as election administrators, we are not able to confirm the citizenship of any registered voter.” She proposed requiring proof of citizenship or legal presence before the state issued a driver’s license, giving election officials a way to screen registrations, and called the fix “long overdue.”
Lawmakers never passed it.
So the honor system rolls on. Washington asks new voters to attest that they’re citizens and takes them at their word. The state issues standard driver’s licenses without checking whether the applicant is in the country legally. And since 2011, Washington has run its elections almost entirely by mail, with ballots landing at whatever address the rolls list and no poll worker ever laying eyes on the voter.
The bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, flagged that exact weak spot back in 2005. “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” the commission wrote.
A Green Card Doesn’t Come With a Ballot Attached
One detail in Floyd’s letter deserves more attention than it will get. He says many of the people on his list are lawful permanent residents.
These aren’t people who sneaked across a river at night. According to federal prosecutors, plenty of them arrived through the legal system and then allegedly helped themselves to a right the law reserves for citizens.
That ought to put to rest the cozy idea that legal status settles every concern about immigration. When the country admits newcomers by the hundreds of thousands every year and a state refuses to check citizenship at the door, the honor system buckles under the sheer numbers. High volume makes assimilation harder. It makes verification harder, too.
Trump has spent years pushing for proof of citizenship at registration, and he backed the SAVE Act, which cleared the House in April 2025 and would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. Democrats fought it tooth and nail as voter suppression. Washington shows what the Democrat alternative looks like after running unchecked since at least 1994.
And the fight won’t end with 405 names. If Hobbs digs in, expect this standoff to head for a courtroom on the same track as California, where Trump sued to stop the counting of mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters federal officials flagged as likely noncitizens. Expect every blue state sitting on a locked voter file to find a similar letter on its desk before the next federal election.
But Washington of all places shouldn’t need a lecture on how thin a winning margin can get.
In 2004, Democrat Christine Gregoire won the governor’s race over Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes after a hand recount of nearly 3 million ballots, the closest governor’s race in American history. Rossi challenged the result in court.
In June 2005, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges ruled that voters had cast at least 1,678 illegal ballots in that election, mostly felons who had lost their voting rights, along with ballots in the names of dead people. Bridges let Gregoire’s victory stand because Republicans couldn’t prove which candidate those illegal ballots went to, and she kept the office by 133 votes.
Sources: Breitbart News, “‘Tip of the Iceberg’: Feds Allege 405 Migrants Voted 1,500 Times,” October 26, 2026; Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, “Trump administration asks Washington state to set aside ballots from 400 voters it says may be noncitizens,” October 26, 2026; Washington State Standard, “Feds allege over 400 noncitizens vote in WA; Hobbs disputes data,” October 26, 2026; Anchorage Daily News, October 26, 2026; KOMO News, October 26, 2026; Associated Press via HeraldNet, “Wyman wants citizen check for Washington voter registration,” September 30, 2016; Law&Crime, citing KING 5, September 2016; HistoryLink.org Essays 7336 and 7405; NBC News, June 2005; Commission on Federal Election Reform, “Building Confidence in US Elections,” 2005