✅ Proven
📅 Aug 2026📍 WA
Franklin County mailed 2024 general-election ballots to four people who had moved out of a Pasco apartment building. The building's manager, Esperanza 'Hope' Contreras, filled them out, forged the voters' signatures, and turned them in. The county's signature check caught one; the other three were counted. The fraud came to light only when a former tenant who had moved to Hermiston, Oregon, learned that her Washington ballot had already been cast. Contreras admitted voting all four ballots and pleaded guilty to four felony counts. In August 2026 Judge Jackie Stam sentenced her to three months in jail on work release.
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✅ Proven
📅 Apr 2024📍 WA
Roberto Manzano of Sumner lived under someone else's identity for more than 20 years. In his April 2024 plea agreement in federal court in Tacoma, he admitted using that identity to vote unlawfully in state and national elections since about 2004, falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen each time he voted. He also used it to work for a logistics company, apply for a Small Business Administration loan, and seek a Transportation Security Administration clearance. TSA noticed conflicting information and referred the case to the Diplomatic Security Service. He pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally disclosing a Social Security number, and both sides recommended five months in prison.
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✅ Proven
📅 Aug 30, 2021📍 WA
Pierce County Auditor Julie Anderson confirmed that five ballots cast in the names of dead voters in the November 2020 general election were counted before anyone caught them. Once a ballot is separated from its envelope it cannot be traced, so those votes stayed in the results. Prosecutors charged three people, and all three pleaded guilty on August 30, 2021. Russell Hobbs of Bonney Lake had voted for his wife, who died about three months earlier. Tamara Amratis of Puyallup voted for her husband, and Daniel Brewer of Spanaway voted for his 19-year-old son. Each was sentenced to community service.
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✅ Proven
📅 Mar 3, 2021📍 WA
Dennis Herron, 79, of Randle came home from burying his wife Carolyn and cast her ballot in the 2020 presidential election, forging her signature. He admitted it to a sheriff's deputy. He pleaded guilty, and on March 3, 2021 Lewis County Superior Court entered a felony judgment and sentence with no jail time and $600 in costs (case 20-1-01069-21).
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✅ Proven
📅 Aug 12, 2014📍 WA
Julie Klein of Marysville, paid up to 75 cents a signature, forged hundreds of names on petitions for Referendum 74 and Initiative 1185 in 2012. State elections staff noticed that the handwriting looked alike: 834 of the 1,001 signatures she turned in for Referendum 74 did not match the voters' signatures on file. Her sheets were thrown out before they could count, and the Secretary of State sent the case to the State Patrol. She pleaded guilty, and on August 12, 2014 Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Anita Farris sentenced her to six months in jail on work release.
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✅ Proven
📅 Jul 13, 2009📍 WA
Susan Risenhoover's son had moved to Texas in June 2008, but his Washington ballot still came to the family home. She was not a registered voter herself. She filled out his ballot for the 2008 presidential election, forged his name, and sent it to the Island County Auditor. Staff saw that the signature did not match his registration card, so the ballot was not counted and the sheriff's office took the case. She pleaded guilty in Island County Superior Court to being an unqualified person voting, a felony, and was sentenced to 40 hours of community service in place of five days in jail, plus $1,217 in court costs.
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✅ Proven
📅 Oct 29, 2007📍 WA
During a 2006 voter-registration drive, temporary workers for the community-organizing group ACORN made up more than 1,800 registration cards. They copied names from phone books, newspapers and baby-name books, and often used the addresses of Seattle homeless shelters. King County election workers noticed that many cards seemed to be written by the same hand. The county's canvassing board revoked 1,762 registrations. Prosecutors charged seven workers with felonies in July 2007, and guilty pleas and jail sentences followed. ACORN paid King County $25,000 for the investigation and signed a five-year agreement to tighten its procedures. Prosecutors said none of the fake registrations was used to vote.
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✅ Proven
📅 Sep 5, 2007📍 WA
To show how easy it was to register someone who could not legally vote, Jane Balogh of Federal Way put her phone bill in her dog's name, Duncan M. MacDonald, and used it to register him as a King County absentee voter in 2006. Ballots arrived in the dog's name for the September and November 2006 elections and a May 2007 election. She wrote 'VOID' on them and signed the envelopes with a paw print, so no votes were cast. She said she was protesting a 2005 state registration law that, in her view, makes it too easy for noncitizens to vote. King County charged her with making a false statement to a public official. Under a September 2007 deal she did 10 hours of community service and paid $240, and the charge was dismissed a year later.
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✅ Proven
📅 Jun 6, 2005📍 WA
Christine Gregoire became governor after a hand recount put her 129 votes ahead of Dino Rossi, out of more than 2.8 million votes. Rossi had led the first count by 261 and the machine recount by 42. At the election-contest trial, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges found that 1,678 illegal votes had been counted. They included 1,401 votes by felons who were not allowed to vote, 19 ballots cast in the names of dead people, 6 people who voted twice, and 252 provisional ballots that should never have been counted. The illegal votes outnumbered the final margin almost 13 to 1. The judge still let the result stand, because Washington law required proof of whom each illegal vote was for, and only 5 could be traced. He took those 5 off the totals, leaving Gregoire ahead by 133.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Sep 22, 2026📍 WA
On September 8, 2025, the Justice Department asked Washington for its full statewide voter list, including the private identifiers used to match records. It said it needed them to check the state's compliance with federal voter-list maintenance law (the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act). Secretary of State Steve Hobbs refused on September 23 and offered only a list without birth dates, driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. The department sued on December 2, 2025 (United States v. Hobbs, Western District of Washington). On September 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson dismissed the case with prejudice. Sixteen states, all led by Republicans, have said they will hand over their full lists.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Jul 2, 2026📍 WA
Washington voters show no ID with a mail ballot; the envelope signature is compared with the registration signature. People registering to vote swear that they are citizens, but they do not have to prove it. Rep. Jim Walsh, chairman of the state Republican Party, filed Initiative IL26-126 in May 2025. It would have required an enhanced driver's license or ID card, or documentary proof of citizenship shown in person, to register and to stay registered. It fell short of the 308,911 signatures needed by January 2, 2026. A second version, Initiative IP26-500, missed the July 2, 2026 deadline. In the Legislature, House Bill 1585 (citizenship verification for voter registration) and House Bill 1584 (ending universal vote-by-mail and restoring polling places) have sat in committee since January 2025.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Jun 29, 2026📍 WA, OR
Washington counts mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive afterward, as long as they arrive before the results are certified. President Trump's March 2025 Executive Order 14248 called for documentary proof of citizenship on the federal registration form and for ballots to be received by Election Day. Washington and Oregon sued. On January 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge John Chun permanently blocked five sections of the order and declared that both states' ballot-receipt deadlines are not preempted by federal law; the government appealed. A second order in March 2026 directed the Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots for states that refuse to hand over their lists of mail voters, and a federal judge blocked it in June. On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Watson v. Republican National Committee that federal law allows states to count ballots postmarked by Election Day.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Mar 17, 2026📍 WA, OR
In summer 2022 a man moved from Oregon to Lewis County and was automatically registered to vote when he got a Washington driver's license. That November he returned both a Washington ballot and an Oregon ballot, and he was convicted of a felony for voting in both states. In January 2026 the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction 2-1. It ruled that state law was ambiguous because the two ballots had no candidates in common. The Legislature then made it a felony to vote in Washington and in another state in the same election cycle. The bill was requested by Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, passed the House unanimously and the Senate 43-1, and was signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson on March 17, 2026.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Jun 20, 2023📍 WA
Public records obtained by The Center Square show that from January 1999 to February 2023, 13 noncitizens cast 48 ballots in Clark County. Nine had been registered through the Department of Licensing, three on a Secretary of State form, and one online. One of them voted 28 times from 2000 until being removed from the rolls in 2019. The county learned of every case only because the noncitizens themselves asked for their voting history while applying for citizenship. None was prosecuted. The Clark County prosecutor has charged just three people for ineligible or double voting, and two of them were sent to a diversion program.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Nov 22, 2022📍 WA
In the November 2020 election, King County Elections sent prosecutors 22 suspicious ballots cast in the names of people who had died before ballots were mailed. Since 2007, Prosecutor Dan Satterberg's office has usually sent warning letters instead of filing charges in such cases, and it mailed these letters about two years later, in October 2022. A KING 5 investigation found that only 42 voter-related criminal cases were filed in all of Washington from 2007 to 2022. King County, with more than 1.3 million voters, charged nine in 15 years, while far smaller Lewis County charged eight.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Feb 1, 2022📍 WA
Washington voters show no ID to vote by mail. The only check on a returned ballot is a comparison of the signature on its envelope with the voter's registration signature. The State Auditor's performance audit of the 2020 general election found that counties applied that check very differently. Ballots in some counties were four to seven times more likely to be rejected than similar ballots elsewhere. Two counties were 18 times more likely to reject for a signature mismatch. Auditors found that 'counties with lower rejection rates appeared more willing to accept less conclusive signatures.' Statewide, 0.72 percent of ballots were rejected, fewer than 30,000 of about 4.2 million, not counting late ballots.
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🏛️ Official
📅 May 5, 2020📍 WA
A five-state comparison of voter records with Oregon, Colorado, Maryland and Delaware found 74 Washington voters who may have voted in two states, voted twice in Washington, or voted a dead person's ballot in the 2016 general election. Secretary of State Kim Wyman sent the cases to county prosecutors in September 2017, but none was charged. King County, where most of the cases were, found that 10 of its 18 people really had voted twice and sent them warning letters. After the 2018 election Wyman's office found 142 more suspected cases of voting in two places or with a dead person's ballot, and turned them over to county auditors in May 2020.
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🏛️ Official
📅 2018📍 WA
Washington's 2018 automatic voter registration law (E2SHB 2595) added a section, RCW 29A.08.370, for the 'rare occasion' when a person who is not eligible to vote is registered anyway. It covers the automatic process at the Department of Licensing and the Health Benefit Exchange. Unless the person knowingly broke the registration law, the registration is 'deemed to have performed an authorized act' and 'may not be considered as evidence of a claim to citizenship.' If that person then votes, he or she is not guilty of illegal voting unless he or she knew of being ineligible. The registration or vote record is removed, and the Secretary of State and the agency are to find out how it happened.
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🏛️ Official
📅 Aug 30, 2005📍 WA
Washington law requires counties to reconcile the absentee ballots returned with those accepted and rejected. In 2004 King County could not tell how many had come back. Absentee supervisor Nicole Way testified that she and assistant superintendent Garth Fell produced a report that showed a perfect match by simply adding the accepted and rejected ballots together. Ballots kept turning up after the count: 573 wrongly rejected absentee ballots in December 2004, and 96 uncounted absentee ballots found after certification. The county's list of people who voted was 3,539 names short of the number of ballots it certified. An outside law-firm investigation in August 2005 blamed Way, and Elections Director Dean Logan moved to fire her. It also found a belief among some staff that it was 'not fatal or crucial if the vote count was not completely accurate.'
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🔍 Under Investigation
📅 Sep 28, 2026📍 WA
In September 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers began asking Canadian permanent residents who live in Washington whether they had ever voted. Point Roberts resident Paige Adamson was held and questioned for six hours on September 15. She was given a notice to appear in immigration court on two charges: falsely claiming U.S. citizenship and voting illegally. Public Washington voter data show she voted in past elections, including the 2020 presidential primary, though she says she does not remember doing so. Blaine immigration attorney Len Saunders says others have been questioned too, including a nurse from Blaine and a Snohomish County man. These are civil immigration cases, not criminal charges.
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🔍 Under Investigation
📅 Aug 31, 2026📍 WA
On July 7, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent Washington's Secretary of State and election officials a seven-page letter. It warned that they could be held criminally liable if they knowingly keep noncitizens on the voter rolls or help noncitizens receive and cast ballots, and gave them five days to explain how they comply. In late August, CNN reported that Homeland Security Investigations had assigned an 'unprecedented number of agents' to voter-fraud cases in nine states, Washington among them, from early September to mid-October. DHS says its SAVE citizenship checks have flagged more than 24,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide. Secretary Hobbs says Washington will not use SAVE, and in September Franklin County asked the state for written permission to run its own check.
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🔍 Under Investigation
📅 Apr 24, 2026📍 WA
In April 2026 a citizen found a heavy box on the ground next to a dumpster behind a Renton strip mall. It was full of King County ballots, and he took it to Washington State Republican Party Chairman Jim Walsh. Walsh said it held a little under 400 ballots that had never reached the voters: many from the 2024 general election, others from 2022, 2023 and 2025. Most were addressed to people who use private mailbox businesses. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service took custody and is investigating with the Renton Police Department, and the FBI is involved. Walsh said the find proves 'the lack of security of tracking where ballots are at each stage in their travels.'
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🔍 Under Investigation
📅 Oct 28, 2024📍 WA, OR
Between 2 and 4 a.m. on October 28, 2024, incendiary devices were placed on ballot drop boxes in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. The Vancouver box at the Fisher's Landing transit center caught fire. Clark County identified 488 damaged ballots and could not identify 6 others; some may have burned to ash. A device had also been placed on a Vancouver drop box on October 8. The FBI, which offers a reward of up to $25,000, is still seeking the suspect: a white man about 30 to 40 years old with thinning hair, driving an early-2000s dark Volvo S60 with a fake temporary Washington license plate.
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📣 Claim
📅 Oct 20, 2023📍 WA
After 2020, volunteers in several Washington counties compared the public voter list with Postal Service change-of-address and Social Security death records, then knocked on doors. In Skagit County the county Republican Party reported 1,530 'anomalies' from more than 3,000 doors. They included over 830 voters who had cast a ballot from an address where they did not live, and at least 43 dead people credited with voting. In Clark County, the Washington Voter Research Project found that 616 of 1,213 voters it checked (50.8 percent) had moved but were still registered at their old address. Of those, 66 voted in 2020 after moving out more than 30 days earlier. A 2020 Judicial Watch study found 13 Washington counties with more registered voters, counting inactive ones, than adult citizens. When Skagit Republicans filed 27 formal challenges in 2023, the county upheld 8.
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📣 Claim
📅 Jun 1, 2022📍 WA
Washington Election Integrity Coalition United (WEICU), led by Tamborine Borrelli of Gig Harbor, filed lawsuits in 2021 in eight counties: Whatcom, Clark, Snohomish, King, Thurston, Pierce, Lincoln and Franklin. It also sued in the Washington Supreme Court. The county suits claimed that about 6,000 votes were 'flipped' and more than 400,000 'added or removed' in statewide races, and asked courts to unseal the 2020 ballots for a full forensic audit like Arizona's. Twenty-eight Snohomish County residents joined as their own lawyers. The courts never weighed the evidence: a federal judge dismissed five county cases because the plaintiffs lacked standing, and ruled that ballots and ballot images are exempt from public-records requests.
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