SEATTLE — Days before the midterm election, the Department of Justice is demanding Washington elections officials set aside the ballots of more than 400 people, asserting they are noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote.

At a news conference Monday, Charles Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, said he’d notified Secretary of State Steve Hobbs of the potentially illegal voters in a letter, and urged him to take immediate action.

Floyd said a federal investigation found “with high confidence” that noncitizens “are voting in the state of Washington in state and federal elections, and many of them have voted multiple times.”

The list of potentially illegal voters cited by Floyd represents a tiny fraction of Washington’s 5 million-plus registered voters. But he said the federal review so far was only based on a small sample.

“This is not the full number of noncitizens who have been voting in Washington. This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Floyd said, adding that the people flagged by the DOJ as noncitizens had voted 1,500 times in total.

In an interview Monday, Hobbs dismissed and disparaged the latest DOJ demands.

“I don’t know where they’re getting these names from,” Hobbs said. “But clearly they don’t know what they’re doing because they’re harassing actual citizens.”

Hobbs said the feds had sent batches of subpoenas over the last three or four weeks asking for voter information on about 100 people. Some of them, he said, were U.S. citizens and some weren’t even on Washington voter rolls.

In an official statement later in the day, Hobbs’ office said it was “carefully reviewing” the DOJ request, but would “only respond to requests that follow due process.”

One of the names on the DOJ list of 400 voter records dated back to 1994, Hobbs’ office said in a news release, noting that since that year, 113.5 million primary and general election ballots have been cast in the state.

The DOJ announcement — and Hobbs’ response — escalate ongoing tensions between Washington officials and the Justice Department, which has unsuccessfully demanded unredacted state voter information to pursue its theories about illegal voters at the direction of President Donald Trump.

Courts across the country have unanimously rejected Trump administration’s lawsuits demanding such data from states, ruling the DOJ has no legal authority to get the information. Last month, a federal judge dealt the administration its 25th consecutive loss, dismissing a DOJ lawsuit against Hobbs.

The clash comes amid a larger Trump administration campaign to hype and crack down on instances of noncitizen voting in the U.S. While there’s little evidence that such fraud is widespread, Trump has repeatedly claimed it is rampant.

The DOJ similarly demanded California officials set aside 20,000 ballots from voters it similarly claims are noncitizens. A federal appeals court on Monday rejected the administration’s request for an injunction to enforce the demand, sending the issue back to a lower court for consideration.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown led an amicus brief from 20 states opposing the DOJ demands in California as frivolous.

Democrats and other critics of the administration have warned Trump is trying to sow doubt about the upcoming midterm results as polls show Republicans are likely to lose majorities in Congress due to the president’s staggering unpopularity.

A similar bout of election conspiracy rhetoric preceded the 2020 presidential election, leading to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who refused to accept his loss.

“Rather than assist states with legitimate security threats, this administration has put the weight of the federal government behind the same lies that drove the violent riots of January 6, 2021,” Brown said in a statement last week.

Floyd criticized Hobbs and other state officials for refusing to share the state’s complete voter rolls, saying it is making federal efforts to scour for illegal voters needlessly difficult and time-consuming.

He accused Washington officials of “sticking their head in the sand” on the issue of voter-roll integrity and “refusing to do anything about it.”

Floyd was joined at the news conference by Pete Serrano, the first assistant U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington, and April Miller, the acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Seattle.

According to The Associated Press, the Justice Department said it expects to send Washington another list of suspected noncitizen registrants before Election Day. The department also acknowledged that some people on its list may have since become naturalized U.S. citizens.

Voting by noncitizens is a felony, and can trigger criminal prosecution and deportation proceedings. In practice, vote fraud prosecutions of any sort have historically been rare in Washington state.

Floyd said federal agents have spoken directly with some of the voters it flagged as ineligible and some said they’d received ballots in the mail and thought they were eligible to vote. He warned any noncitizens against attempting to register to vote or cast a ballot this year as the federal government is now seeking out such illegal voting.

He also warned that elections officials in Washington could face consequences if they knowingly allow illegal votes to be cast.

Asked if that was a threat of criminal prosecution, Floyd said he wouldn’t speculate about any specific individuals. But he said “anyone who assists someone in voting illegally would also be guilty of that crime under the aiding and abetting theory.”

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(Seattle Times staff reporter David Gutman contributed to this report.)

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