Four hundred and five. That is the number the Justice Department wants you to find alarming, in a state with millions of registered voters. Its prosecutors want those ballots set aside days before the Nov. 3 election, and they gave Washington 48 hours to comply or face emergency litigation.
Look at what the letter actually claims. The people on the list "may include" lawful permanent residents. Not do include. May. The department is asking a state to hold the votes of 405 people on the strength of a maybe.
The Secretary of State's office has already found the first crack in the list. It includes people whose voting records go back to the 1990s, including one who last voted in 1994. That is not a fresh catch of illegal voters. It is an old database dredged up and mailed out as an emergency. Someone who registered decades ago may have been a noncitizen when a government office first recorded them and a citizen long before they ever cast a ballot. Naturalization is the whole point of the immigration system. Matching a stale record against a current one and calling the gap fraud is how you flag a new American as a criminal.
We have seen this movie. In 2019, Texas announced that roughly 95,000 registered voters might be noncitizens, and the president amplified it. The list fell apart because it was full of naturalized citizens, and the state backed down in court. Florida's 2012 purge went the same way. The pattern is that the announcement travels far and the correction doesn't.
Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, and it is vanishingly rare. Every serious audit finds it. That rarity is precisely why a list like this should be treated with suspicion rather than deference. When you hunt for something that almost never happens, most of your hits will be false positives, and false positives here are citizens.
The remedy matters too. Washington's secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, said the state will respond to requests that follow due process. That is not obstruction. It is the entire difference between a government and a mob with letterhead. If someone is ineligible, the answer is individual notice, a chance to prove citizenship, and a determination made on evidence. It is not a blanket hold on a list the federal government cannot yet vouch for, imposed on a deadline set by prosecutors rather than by any court. Federal law is also wary of systematic list-cleaning close to a federal election, because the people who get swept up have no time to fix it. Ballots held in the final week are, in practice, ballots at risk of never being counted.
My fellow Democrats should be honest about one point: officials owe voters confidence that rolls are accurate, and "nothing to see here" is a weak answer to every question. If Washington has records showing noncitizens on its rolls, it should say so and process them lawfully. Hobbs is right to review the letter rather than stonewall it.
But notice who is demanding speed and who is demanding care. The department has not filed a lawsuit. It sent a letter with a clock on it, and the letter itself is the product. Whatever happens to those 405 ballots, the public hears that the Justice Department suspects a Democratic-run mail-voting state of counting illegal votes. If the count is close anywhere, that suspicion is ready-made. The department is entitled to enforce the law. It is not entitled to use the final week of an election to manufacture doubt about it.
A federal government confident in its evidence would present it to a judge, with names, sources and dates, and let the voters involved respond. One that issues ultimatums on a list including a 1994 vote is asking Americans to trust it. Right now it has not earned that.
How it may affect me
If you vote in Washington, your ballot is not affected unless you are among the 405 flagged. Naturalized citizens should confirm their registration status with the Secretary of State's office or at VoteWA.gov and respond promptly to any notice from county election officials, since a request for proof of citizenship is the point at which a mistake can be corrected.
