Acting U.S. attorney Neil Floyd says investigators found 405 noncitizens who cast over 1,500 ballots in Washington, and calls it only the tip of the iceberg.
Federal prosecutors in Washington state say they have identified hundreds of people they believe are not U.S. citizens who voted in state and federal elections, and they want those ballots held out of the count until eligibility is checked.
Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said Monday that investigators have flagged 405 such voters and more than 1,500 ballots cast across multiple elections. The request to state officials comes ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, and Floyd said his office intends to pursue criminal cases against people who vote illegally and anyone who knowingly helps them do it.
Breitbart reported that Department of Homeland Security investigators compared publicly available Washington voter lists with federal records, then checked whether the people they flagged had actually cast ballots. Floyd said the work required several identity checks and moved slowly because the state would not hand over its full voter file.
Floyd did not frame the findings as a finished statewide total. He described them as an early cut from a limited review.
Floyd said:
"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."
He offered no separate statewide count to back the larger estimate. A report on the investigation said the 1,500 ballots cited were allegedly cast over several decades.
Federal officials sent the 405 names to Washington election officials and asked them to set aside any ballots from those voters until citizenship and eligibility can be verified.
Floyd put the bottleneck on the state. He said Washington refused to give federal investigators the complete list of registered voters with identifying information, forcing a one-by-one approach instead of a clean database match.
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."
That refusal matters for timing. Prosecutors are trying to sort eligibility before a national election, while working from partial public lists and federal records rather than a full state file. Floyd said criminal cases remain on the table for illegal voting and for people who knowingly assist it. No charges from this batch were detailed in the available reporting.
The Washington probe sits beside a separate Justice Department action in California. Federal officials sued to stop the state from counting mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters they identified as likely noncitizens until citizenship could be verified. California officials challenged the evidence behind that list.
Last week, Los Angeles County officials told a court they could not independently verify voters’ citizenship beyond what those voters stated on their registration forms. In plain terms, the county said it relies on the honor system at registration and lacks a separate check of its own.
Two large blue states. Two federal pushes to freeze ballots tied to suspected noncitizens. Two local systems that, on the public record described here, are not built to catch the problem early
The case Floyd described rests on record matching, not on a jury verdict. DHS investigators lined up Washington’s public voter lists against federal data, flagged people they believe are not citizens, and then checked voting history. Floyd said the office has “high confidence” in the noncitizen finding for the 405 already identified.
He also said many of those people voted more than once, which is how investigators reached the figure of more than 1,500 ballots. Whether each ballot is ultimately ruled illegal is a charging and court question he has not closed in the remarks reported Monday. He has said the office will pursue criminal cases where the law supports them.
Open questions remain. The absolute calendar date for the Monday statement was not pinned down beyond the relative timing. The full matching methodology beyond “several checks” was not laid out. And Washington’s response to the set-aside request was not confirmed in the material at hand.
Election integrity is not a vibe. It is names, rolls, citizenship, and ballots that can be checked before they decide a race. When federal prosecutors say they already have 405 suspected noncitizen voters and 1,500 ballots in one state, and a state database still out of reach, voters are right to demand the hold, the audit, and the prosecutions.
