Election Day 2026: WA Secretary of State joins Good Day Seattle

Well, it is election day. Thousands of voters across the country casting their votes. And here in our state, it is the last day to drop off your ballot at a drop box. And this morning, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs joining us here. Good morning to you, sir. Good to be here. And it's not too late to register to vote. If you are registering today, what do folks need to bring with them and where do they go? They go straight to the election center, whatever county you're in, go to your county auditor's office or election director if you're in King County, bring your driver's license, bring your social security card, bring yourself. But make sure that you go there before 8 p.m. OK, I want to talk about voter integrity as well. That's been in the news a lot. The Department of Justice claiming there are potentially illegal voters in our state. And you've been handling elections in our state for years and years now. Do you expect federal challenges to the vote this year? And what sort of preparations have you been making for a potential challenge? You know, I certainly hope that doesn't happen. Unfortunately, DOJ has been doing these lawsuits against us. We've won our lawsuit. In fact, we're not the only state, there's 25, 26 other states that have won their lawsuits. The list that they gave us of 400 names, you know, we went through it. We found a lot of them had already, they had their birth certificates. They were missing. They don't even exist on our voter rolls. They were duplicates. It's so... We've asked for more information from the DOJ so that we can find out exactly what this list means. We've seen an increase in threats to election offices, potential interference. In fact, seven counties in our state have National Guard members monitoring ballot boxes. What are those soldiers doing today out near ballot boxes? Yeah, so the primary mission for the National Guard, being a Guard member myself, I got drilled this weekend. Is to help with the physical security of these ballot boxes. So for example, Clark County asked for National Guard members to put eyes on their ballot boxes during night. If you might recall two years ago, it was the ballot boxes in Clark County, one of them blew up. Okay, so there are other threats to this election as well and you're uncovering some new cyber threats, I understand. Yeah, there's always an uptick in cyber threats and there was an uptick. In our state with cyber threats, in fact, trying to target the map with all the ballot box locations on it. So we've been seeing this increase in cyber attacks. Okay, so what can you tell us about that? I mean, how did you uncover that? Who do you think is behind it? Well, the great thing is we have a great cybersecurity team. We also team up with the National Guard that provides us with some assistance and cyber assistance. And usually it's nation state actors, but sometimes there's criminal activities that that go on behind the scenes that attack. A lot of them are nation-state actors that tried to attack us. Okay, there are some election observers that will be on hand today. Can you tell us what they're doing? Yeah, the Department of Justice is sending two teams, one to Yakima County and one to King County, so they'll be at the Renton-King County Elections Office there. Thank you. The U.S. House of Representatives is sending a team to observe the elections in the third congressional district. The idea of rigged elections and voter fraud has been spoken about by the president for the last decade now. Just in general, what do you make of this continued attack on voting? Well, I don't get it because the numbers aren't there. So if you look at our state from 2005 to 2025, you only had five instances of voter fraud. If you look at non-citizens voting, you got 1982 to 2025, you only had 15 instances of voter fraud. I think what the problem is, is we haven't been telling people about elections. We haven't been telling people that there's audits before and after the election, that we test tabulation machines, that our data is connected and compares with other data. Like the Social Security Office, so we know when people die, when we know when people register in another state, we know when people vote in the same election twice. We've had mail-in voting in our state for a long time, and the voting process is pretty simple here. I mean, we don't have to wait in long lines. However, in other states, folks do have to wait in long lines sometimes. Some people have to take the day off of work just to be able to go out and vote that day. Why is that? Do you talk to other secretaries of state about different voting processes and other states I do, and a lot of the secretaries are jealous of our situation here and wish their legislature would kind of go to a vote-by-mail situation that we have. Because you're absolutely right, and it's easier for Washingtonians to do their vote because they can do it at the comfort of their own home, they get a voter guide, which by the way, a lot of states don't have a voter's guide. Really? That's that's interesting. So what if someone is dropping off their ballot today? They feel intimidated that there's somebody around that they don't they don't understand why they're there. What do people do? Who do they contact? Well, first of all, you can if your safety is paramount. Okay, so what you should probably do is go to a different ballot box. You should probably call 911 if you feel if you feel that this suspicious behavior is happening near a ballot box. Okay, so we have heard Threats, insinuations that potentially ICE agents could be showing up at polling places around the country. What intelligence do we have about that possibility in our state? So, so far, we have not heard of any federal agents at any of our ballot boxes or election centers. So that's great. And we've provided guidance for all the counties in case there's a federal agent that shows up. But we have not heard of anything. At this particular moment other than the election observers and hopefully we won't Steve Hobbs our secretary of state. Thank you so much for coming in taking time to join us. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Get out there and vote today. Ballot boxes closed at 8 p.m. tonight.