The Department of Justice has identified at least 350,000 dead people still listed on voter rolls after reviewing 60 million records, and has referred roughly 25,000 individuals with no citizenship records to the Department of Homeland Security for further investigation, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said Sunday.
Dhillon laid out the scope of the problem during an appearance on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" with Maria Bartiromo, describing a federal voter-roll review that has already triggered lawsuits against 29 states and the District of Columbia. The numbers she cited amount to one of the most detailed public accountings yet of just how far state voter registration lists have drifted from accuracy.
The figures land at a moment when the Trump administration is pressing an aggressive, multi-front legal campaign to force states to hand over voter data the DOJ says it is entitled to under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Many of those states have refused, and several federal judges have sided with them, at least for now.
Dhillon told Bartiromo that the jurisdictions reviewed so far represent only a fraction of the country's total voter registrations. Yet even that partial look turned up staggering irregularities. As the Daily Caller reported, Dhillon put the problem bluntly:
"States are not in compliance, even those ones who want to. So, for the ones that we've run so far, 60 million records that we've run, we found at least 350,000 dead people currently on the voter rolls in those jurisdictions, and we've referred approximately 25,000 people with no citizenship records to [the Department of] Homeland Security to look at, you know, dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted."
That means roughly one in every 170 records the DOJ examined belonged to a dead person. And one in every 2,400 belonged to someone with no citizenship documentation on file at all. Those are not rounding errors. They are systemic failures in the basic maintenance that federal law already requires.
Dhillon also said she has been in direct contact with voting-rights activists who have provided evidence of non-citizens casting ballots, a claim the political left has long dismissed as a myth. In a separate Newsmax appearance last month, Dhillon cited a review of more than 50 million voter records that found more than 300,000 deceased registrants and tens of thousands of potential non-citizens, figures broadly consistent with her Sunday remarks.
Dhillon singled out Minnesota as a case study in lax enforcement. She told Bartiromo that someone was recently indicted there for voting without being a citizen, and that she had sent a document request to the state regarding the case.
The state's registration process drew particular criticism. Minnesota allows citizens to vouch for one another's citizenship, a practice Dhillon called inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act. A federal grand jury has separately subpoenaed Minnesota's secretary of state over non-citizen voter registration concerns, underscoring the depth of federal scrutiny the state now faces.
Dhillon stated the DOJ's position plainly:
"Minnesota has a weird vouching law that allows citizens to vouch for each other's citizenship. That's crazy and inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act and we're not going to rest until we complete this project."
A vouching system may sound neighborly in theory. In practice, it creates a verification gap that federal officials now say undermines the integrity of the rolls. When the standard for proving citizenship is another person's word, the safeguard is only as strong as the honor system behind it.
The legal battle over voter data has expanded rapidly. Dhillon said she is suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to turn over voter registration lists that the DOJ argues it can demand under the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
AP News reported that the Justice Department sued Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington in one recent round of filings, bringing the total to at least 14 states at that time. The DOJ has sought not only public voter-list information but also personally identifiable data, including names, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.
A later round of lawsuits targeted Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Utah, and West Virginia, the Washington Examiner reported, pushing the total to 29 states. Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the effort in direct terms: "Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve."
The administration's broader election-integrity campaign extends well beyond voter rolls. President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 requiring the Election Assistance Commission to update its voter registration form to require proof of citizenship, a move aimed at closing the front door to the problem Dhillon is now documenting on the back end.
The DOJ's campaign has not gone unchallenged. Dhillon acknowledged that federal judges ruled against the Trump administration in several of these voter-roll cases. She did not name the judges or detail the rulings, but she made clear the department is not backing down.
"We're expediting the appeals in these cases. There'll be an appeal in the Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] and the Sixth Circuit soon."
The pattern is familiar. Federal district courts, particularly in circuits with judges appointed by prior administrations, have frequently served as the first line of resistance to Trump-era enforcement actions. The question is whether appellate courts will read the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as broadly as the DOJ does, or whether states will succeed in arguing that the data requests exceed federal authority.
The DOJ has also been active on other election-related fronts, including a challenge to California's congressional map over Voting Rights Act concerns, signaling that the department's election-integrity focus is not limited to voter rolls alone.
For years, progressive politicians and allied advocacy groups insisted that non-citizen voting was a negligible problem, a talking point used to justify voter suppression. Dhillon addressed that claim head-on.
"I'm in touch with voting rights activists who are showing me information about people who have voted who are not American citizens. So the Left told us this never happens and it's a myth, it definitely happened."
The 25,000 referrals to DHS do not, by themselves, prove that 25,000 non-citizens voted. Dhillon was careful to describe the referral as a step toward further investigation, to "dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted." But the sheer volume of records flagged suggests the problem is not the phantom that critics claimed.
Meanwhile, the Fox News segment covering the DOJ's legal action against 29 states and D.C. framed the effort as part of a broader Trump administration voting-integrity initiative, one that has now touched more than half the states in the country.
Federal enforcement of voter-roll accuracy should not be controversial. The National Voter Registration Act requires states to maintain clean rolls. The Help America Vote Act sets standards for registration systems. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives the attorney general authority to inspect election records. These are not novel legal theories. They are existing statutes that went largely unenforced for years.
The fact that the DOJ had to sue 29 states and D.C. just to obtain the data tells you how deeply entrenched the resistance is. States that refuse to share their rolls are not protecting voters. They are protecting the mess.
Dhillon told Newsmax last month that "the left keeps moving the goalposts" on voter-roll integrity. The administration's response has been to stop chasing the goalposts and start filing lawsuits. Whether the courts ultimately compel compliance remains an open question, but the numbers already on the table, 350,000 dead registrants, 25,000 people with no citizenship records, and federal investigators probing election offices in multiple states, make one thing clear: the rolls were never as clean as Americans were told.
When the people in charge of the voter rolls won't even let federal officials look at them, the question isn't whether there's a problem. It's how big the problem really is.
