WASHINGTON — Washington officials recently stopped a cyberattack targeting an election information page, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs told KIRO 7 on Tuesday, as the state takes additional steps to secure ballots and Washington’s election system.
READ MORE: WA midterm elections 2026
“There was a cyberattack that was made against the office itself, targeting specifically the map of all the ballot boxes,” Hobbs told KIRO 7.
The state called it a sharp increase in traffic on that page that took it down for a time. The map is back up.
“Luckily, our cyber defense is really strong,” he said.
Security around ballot drop boxes has also been increased in parts of the state. National Guard soldiers in plain clothes are monitoring boxes in seven counties, including King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.
“They are under the governor’s authority, but they’re going to be, when they’re assigned to the county, they’re going to be taking all instructions and directions from the county,” Hobbs said.
Hobbs told KIRO 7 that voters are increasingly choosing those drop boxes to return their ballots instead of using the U.S. Postal Service.
About 20,000 votes in the August primary did not get counted because they arrived too late due to issues with USPS, many of them in rural areas.
“Seventy-two percent of the voters are using drop boxes, which is much higher than usual, so that is a good sign,” Hobbs said. “And also, we noticed an uptick in ballots coming in earlier.”
Hobbs predicted overall turnout for the midterm would reach about 60%.
The Secretary of State’s Office is also confronting questions about voter eligibility after the Department of Justice last week demanded that Washington set aside ballots from more than 400 people the department claimed were voting illegally.
But Hobbs said state officials found problems when they reviewed the list.
“When we went through the list, we found actual citizens with actual birth certificates on there,” Hobbs said. “We found duplicates. We found names on there that weren’t even on the voter rolls.”
He said his office has asked the DOJ for more information.
“What would you say to those critics who say, well, Washington state doesn’t have a system for verifying that voters are U.S. citizens?” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.
“What I would tell people is, look, if you look across the United States, we’re all following the same federal laws,” Hobbs said.
Voters in Washington are required to sign the back of their ballot envelope and attest that they are U.S. citizens.
However, he acknowledged that “there is no system in place to actually verify a person’s citizenship.”
Hobbs told KIRO 7 he would be open to using a federal citizenship verification tool known as the SAVE system if concerns surrounding the system were addressed.
Data is currently kept for ten years and there have been issues with the system’s accuracy.
“I would like to be able to use it at the state level, but we’ve got to fix this database, and we’ve got to fix the retention rules on it,” Hobbs said.
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