The Justice Department effort has targeted battleground states. It follows a March executive order.
Judge blocks Trump executive order on voting
A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to require proof of citizenship on voter registration forms.
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The Department of Justice is going state by state to scrutinize how officials manage their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters.
The effort is so far focused on battleground states and follows President Donald Trump‘s widely challenged executive order in March that sought to create new requirements to register to vote and backed a range of voting policies long supported by Republicans.
In nearly identical letters to state election officials in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the Department of Justice asked them to describe how they identify people who are felons, dead, nonresidents or noncitizens, and how they remove them from their voter lists.
A letter to Arizona officials said the state should be requiring people who have driver’s license numbers to register to vote using that number instead of the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. The Department of Justice said the office should conduct a review of its voter file.
The department also sued Orange County, California for not providing enough identifying information in response to a records request; and filed documents in support of lawsuits brought by the right-leaning group Judicial Watch that say Illinois and Oregon have not been not removing enough people from their voter rolls.
“It is critical to remove ineligible voters from the registration rolls so that elections are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement that a spokesperson provided to USA TODAY. She said the department would “vigorously enforce” federal law that requires states to “conduct a robust program of list maintenance.”
Several of the states in question have competitive elections in November 2026, when all seats in the House and one-third of the seats in the Senate are on the ballot. Minnesota has a race for an open Senate seat. Arizona and Pennsylvania have multiple competitive House races, and there will be a tight race for a House seat in California that includes part of Orange County.
Americans are more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud, according to a study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan good government group based at New York University.
“I do think this is part of a broader effort number one to lay the groundwork for attempts to overturn election results that they don’t like in 2026,” said Jonathan Diaz, the voting advocacy director at Campaign Legal Center. “So they can cook up some story about how these states’ voter rolls can’t be trusted and so we can’t trust their election results if Democrats win.”
Trump’s March executive order alleged that previous administrations didn’t do enough to keep noncitizens of the voter rolls and said having accurate voter rolls protects voters.
What DOJ wants from the lawsuits
In Orange County, the Department of Justice wrote in a federal lawsuit in June that the Attorney General received a complaint about a noncitizen receiving a ballot, and that the department requested five years of data on how the county removes noncitizens from voter registration rolls.
The county provided information but redacted identifying numbers and signatures, among other things, according to the lawsuit. The Department of Justice says that’s illegal, and wants the federal court to force the county to provide the full information.
Diaz said the Department of Justice in general is “asking for a lot of very specific data about individual voters, which normally would not be necessary.” He said that information is much more specific than what states would provide to political campaigns or journalists, who often obtain voter registration files.
The Department of Justice also asked Nevada and Minnesota for copies of their statewide voter registration list with both active and inactive voters. Inactive voters generally have not voted in recent elections and are put on the inactive list to preserve their registration while queuing them for future removal.
Diaz said the requests read “like a fishing expedition.” He predicted that the Department of Justice may find a human error, such as a noncitizen who checks the wrong box when getting their drivers license and registers to vote, and then “make that a referendum on the entire electoral system.”
“They are looking for anything they can find so they can yell about noncitizen voting or dead people voting or whatever their conspiracy theory of the day is,” Diaz said.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a right-leaning organization that advocates for government transparency, said many states are not doing enough to maintain clean voter rolls. He said his organization has sued multiple jurisdictions over the years to get about 5 million names removed from voter rolls, including in New York City and Los Angeles.
Fitton said a voter registration list is “a pool of names from which someone with problematic intent can draw to engage in fraud. And the appearance of dirty voting lists undermines voter confidence and participation.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation alleges there have been about 1,600 cases of voter fraud over a period of many years. That compares to more than 150 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election alone.
Fitton acknowledged that showing up to vote in another person’s name requires a level of “chutzpah” that “might be a step too far to even political fraudsters.” He posited that it’d be easier to impersonate a dead voter, but concluded: “All that is speculation. The law requires the names to be cleaned up, and it’s not being done.”
In its federal lawsuit in Oregon, which the Department of Justice is backing, Judicial Watch alleges the state has too many people on its voter rolls in comparison to its voting-age population, and wants the federal court to force the state to develop a new removal program. Oregon contends that the organization doesn’t have the right to sue and hasn’t proven it’s been harmed, which are both necessary for the suit to move forward.
In Illinois, Judicial Watch says that 11 counties removed no voter registrations between November 2020 and November 2022, and 12 other counties removed 15 or fewer during the same time period. The suit does not allege that anyone voted illegally, but questions whether so few voters could have moved or died. The Illinois State Board of Elections declined to comment on pending litigation.
“When Illinois voters cast their ballots, they should be confident that their vote is given its due weight, undiluted by ineligible voters,” the Department of Justice wrote in its July 21 filing in the case. “This confidence is the bedrock of participatory democracy.”