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A federal judge in Seattle has barred the Justice Department from demanding that Washington counties set aside the ballots of voters whose names appear on its noncitizen voter list, and from threatening election officials with prosecution for counting those ballots. U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead issued the temporary restraining order on the evening of Nov. 5, Politico reported, and it runs for two weeks while counties finish counting and certifying the Nov. 3 results. The order does not decide whether anyone on the roughly 400-name list is a citizen. It decides who gets to make that call, and when.
“Voters who followed the rules should not lose their votes to a list that even its authors admit may include citizens,” the judge wrote, according to Politico.
How a DHS-sourced list became a ballot fight
The dispute began on Oct. 26, when Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, and Pete Serrano, the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District, announced at a press conference that they had identified 405 registered noncitizens, OPB and KUOW reported. Floyd said the people on the list had cast more than 1,500 ballots over the years and called the findings “only the tip of the iceberg.” The prosecutors said the names came from the Department of Homeland Security, and their letter to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs urged that matching ballots not be counted until citizenship could be determined.
Hobbs refused. As covered here last week, his office said it found U.S. citizens on the list and names that were not registered at all, and he wrote that the letter gave “no information about how the information was collected or what sources were used,” according to KUOW. Days later, OneAmerica Votes, the Latino Community Fund of Washington and the union UFCW 3000 sued in Seattle federal court, arguing that the list was “not evidence of anything.”
The Justice Department’s position, as described by Politico from a Nov. 4 filing, is that it asked only that the ballots be set aside “momentarily” and put no pressure on the state beyond the letter. A department spokesperson declined to comment on the order.
What the numbers can and cannot show
Washington has more than 5.1 million registered voters, according to OPB. Even taken at face value, the federal list would amount to less than one hundredth of 1 percent of that total, a calculation based on those two reported figures. Hobbs told TVW in October that the state had confirmed 15 cases of noncitizen voting between 1982 and 2025, OPB reported. Those figures are not directly comparable: one counts confirmed cases, the other counts names a federal agency flagged without the state yet seeing its method.
Data matching is where these lists tend to break down. Immigration records capture a person’s status on the date of an application, so someone who naturalized later, or who became a citizen automatically through a parent, can still show up as a noncitizen in an older record. The plaintiffs pointed to California, where a sample of Los Angeles entries on a similar federal list included more than a quarter showing a U.S. birthplace and more than 40 percent tied to registrations already cancelled, KUOW reported. That list, roughly 20,000 names, has been the subject of its own litigation, and the Supreme Court refused the department’s bid to hold California mail ballots.
The stakes for green card holders. Floyd said some permanent residents were registered unknowingly through the state’s motor-voter system. Voting in a federal election as a noncitizen is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 611, and unlawful voting is a separate ground of deportability and inadmissibility under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a consequence that can surface years later in a naturalization interview. The statute does carry a narrow defense for people who reasonably believed they were citizens. The department has already charged 63 people nationwide, most of them green card holders.
The practical effect of the order is narrow but well timed. Washington law gives county canvassing boards 21 days after a general election to certify results, so the two-week order covers most of the counting window. It does not stop the department from investigating or charging individuals. The broader fight is unsettled: Politico reported that the Ninth Circuit this week stayed a San Francisco judge’s order, reported here on Oct. 30, that had blocked the department from threatening election workers nationwide. That stay makes the Washington order more important for the plaintiffs, and an appeal to the same circuit is a likely next step.
What to watch
- About Nov. 19: the two-week order expires unless the court extends it or converts it into a preliminary injunction.
- Nov. 24: the 21-day county certification deadline for the Nov. 3 general election.
- Ninth Circuit: whether the department seeks an emergency stay, as it did in the San Francisco case.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- Politico (syndicated), “Federal judge orders Justice Department to stop threatening election officials in Washington state” (Nov. 5, 2026)
- OPB/KUOW, “Federal attorneys allege hundreds of non-citizens are voting in Washington elections” (Oct. 26, 2026)
- KUOW, “Washington’s Secretary of State rebuffs claims that non-citizens are voting en masse” (Oct. 28, 2026)
- KUOW, “Washington immigrant, labor groups accuse feds of voter intimidation” (Nov. 2, 2026)
- 18 U.S.C. 611, Voting by aliens
- RCW 29A.60.190, Washington canvass and certification deadlines
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