I'm Paris Jackson in the Cascade PBS newsroom.

A bill intended to protect the rights of Washington voters and manage voter registration laws.

It's making it further than it did last year in the state capitol.

House Bill 1916 would make it harder to challenge voters registration by making the rules tighter and increasing penalties for bringing false challenges.

This has become a partisan issue, where Democrats want to nip frivolous challenges by Republicans in the bud, stemming from Republicans unfounded claims of voter fraud in 2020.

The Washington State Standard reports that Republicans argue that HB 1916 would add hurdles to public oversight of elections and make it harder to withdraw ineligible voters from the state rolls.

Secretary of State Steve Hobbs says there are very few cases of voter fraud, but that the process could be more transparent.

-All you have to do is look at the Heritage Foundation.

They did their own study and they're a conservative organization, and they look from 2002 to 2023.

And they found, what, maybe 80 some non-citizens voted in that, that time span.

It's not the problem that people think.

But our office needs to do a better job, and we are doing that, of informing the public of how we check all these things.

-Meanwhile, Washington is among more than two dozen states being sued by the US Justice Department for not turning over its voter rolls.

Hobbs says the DOJ is trying to force his office to give up voter information and data beyond what is public information.

-But the private information not only goes against state law, goes against federal law as well.

But in our case, DOJ has improperly filed the lawsuit against us.

And so we're still waiting.

I think they filed it back in December and they still haven't corrected.

-I'm Paris Jackson.

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