Federal prosecutors said Monday that investigators have identified 405 people they believe are not U.S. citizens who voted in Washington state elections, casting more than 1,500 ballots over multiple elections.
Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said federal officials sent the names to state election officials and asked them to set aside any ballots from those voters until their eligibility can be checked.
Floyd said investigators were confident in their findings but believe the number of noncitizens who have voted in Washington could be much higher:
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 provide a statewide count to support his estimate that thousands of noncitizens had voted. The 1,500 ballots he cited were allegedly cast over several decades, according to a report on the investigation.
The request comes ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
Floyd said Department of Homeland Security investigators compared publicly available Washington voter lists with federal records to identify registered voters they believe were not citizens. They then checked whether those individuals had cast ballots.
He said investigators had to conduct several checks to make sure the records referred to the same person, making the work time-consuming.
Washington has declined to provide the federal government with its full voter registration database, including personal identifying information. Floyd said:
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 would pursue criminal cases against people who vote illegally and those who knowingly help them do so.
Last week, Breitbart News reported that Los Angeles County officials told a court they could not independently verify voters’ citizenship beyond what voters stated on their registration forms.
The Justice Department sued California to stop the state from counting mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal officials identified as likely noncitizens until their citizenship could be verified. California officials challenged the evidence behind the list.
