State Official Admits No System To Identify Whether Voters Are Noncitizens

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A top Washington state official said on Oct. 29 that the state has no way to confirm whether people are U.S. citizens when registering them to vote.

“We don’t have a system that can identify whether someone is an actual noncitizen,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said during a press conference in King County.

Hobbs also said that “it’s not unusual for noncitizens to actually be on voter rolls” and that “we never said that there are none on there.”

Federal officials recently said they identified more than 400 people registered to vote in Washington state who are suspected of being noncitizens.

They said they would send Hobbs’s office a list of the people and ask him to set aside ballots from those individuals until their citizenship status could be confirmed.

Hobbs, responding in a letter on Wednesday, said a preliminary analysis showed that some of the people on the list are not currently registered to vote and that others are U.S. citizens, “based on information of which Washington is aware.” Hobbs asked the federal government for “individualized proof that certain registered voters in Washington are ineligible.”

Washington state has automatic voter registration. That means people who present proof of citizenship to state agencies are automatically registered to vote.

To meet the requirements, a person must sign a statement saying they’re a U.S. citizen and provide identification.

Hobbs told the briefing, after saying the state lacks a system to verify citizenship, “That’s why when people go up to get their registration done at a [government facility], they are asked if they are a noncitizen, they are asked to sign the form; they’re attesting whether or not they’re a U.S. citizen.”

Hobbs’s comments show that the state “does nothing to confirm citizenship” and is “knowingly sending out ballots to noncitizens and trusting that the noncitizens will not fill out the ballot,” Charles Neil Floyd, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, said in a statement to news outlets on Oct. 29.

“Registering noncitizens to vote with or without their knowledge could jeopardize their ability to become citizens. The noncitizens we have interviewed tell us that they assumed they could vote because the state sent them a ballot.”

Hobbs said registering noncitizens to vote could happen because a noncitizen wasn’t listening to what a government worker said or because a government worker clicked the wrong box.

He said that there have been 15 cases of noncitizen voting between 1982 and 2025 in the state.

Hobbs and King County Elections Director Julie Wise, who has expressed concerns in the past about noncitizens being registered to vote, told the briefing that noncitizens who are registered to vote have in the past called authorities to have their names removed.

“It is not a crime to be accidentally put on the voter roll, because sometimes it’s not their fault,” Hobbs said.

Officials noted that voting as a noncitizen is a crime, with prison time among the penalties upon conviction.