The Department of Justice has found at least 350,000 dead people registered to vote across the jurisdictions it has reviewed so far, and 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 laid out those numbers on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," painting a picture of state voter rolls riddled with errors and, in some cases, outright ineligible registrants.
Dhillon told host Maria Bartiromo that her office has processed 60 million voter records to date. The results, she said, confirm what election-integrity advocates have warned about for years: the rolls are a mess, and the states responsible for maintaining them have failed to keep up.
The numbers alone tell the story. Three hundred fifty thousand dead registrants across a partial review. Twenty-five thousand names flagged for having no citizenship documentation on file. And those figures come from only the jurisdictions DOJ has managed to audit, not the full country. The department is now suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over their voter rolls, which Dhillon says the attorney general is entitled to inspect under the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
Dhillon did not mince words about the scope of state resistance. She told Bartiromo:
"I'm suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for their refusal to give us the voter rolls to which the attorney general or the acting attorney general is entitled under the Civil Rights Act of 1960."
The DOJ says it is seeking the data to enforce the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and other federal laws designed to protect the integrity of elections. That framing matters: these are not obscure statutes. The NVRA requires states to make reasonable efforts to maintain accurate rolls, removing deceased registrants, updating addresses, and flagging ineligible voters. The Help America Vote Act sets baseline standards for voter registration systems nationwide.
Yet when the federal government asks to verify whether states are meeting those obligations, the response from more than half the country has been refusal. The Washington Examiner reported that the DOJ filed federal lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Utah, and West Virginia for allegedly failing to provide complete voter registration lists. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in connection with those filings that "accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve."
The legal campaign has expanded in waves. AP News reported that the department sued Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington in a separate round, with requests sent to at least 26 states before the total number of lawsuits climbed to the 29 Dhillon cited on Sunday. Some states have argued they cannot legally share private voter information such as birth dates, driver's license numbers, or partial Social Security numbers.
That objection deserves scrutiny. Federal law already contemplates the sharing of voter data for compliance purposes. The question is not whether the data is sensitive, of course it is, but whether states can use privacy concerns as a blanket shield against federal oversight of their own legal obligations. The DOJ's position is that they cannot.
Dhillon's most striking claim involved the sheer volume of ineligible registrants her office has already identified. She told Bartiromo:
"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 last clause is the one that should keep election officials up at night. The DOJ is not merely flagging names. It is asking Homeland Security to determine whether any of those 25,000 individuals actually cast ballots. If even a fraction did, the implications for election integrity in those jurisdictions are serious.
Dhillon also pointed to a recent indictment in Minnesota involving a non-citizen who allegedly voted. She said she has sent a document request to the state in connection with that case. The broader push to verify voter eligibility has parallels in recent court battles over voter ID laws, where states have fought for years over basic verification requirements.
Minnesota drew particular attention from Dhillon because of what she described as a "weird vouching law" that allows citizens to vouch for each other's citizenship at the polls. She called it "inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act" and said DOJ would not rest until the review was complete.
For years, the standard progressive response to concerns about non-citizen voting has been to dismiss them as a myth. Dhillon addressed that directly:
"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."
Not every federal judge has sided with the administration. Dhillon acknowledged that in several cases, federal judges ruled against the Trump administration's efforts to obtain voter data. But she made clear the department is not backing down.
She told Bartiromo the DOJ is expediting its appeals and expects cases to reach both the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Sixth Circuit soon. Those circuits cover vast swaths of the country, the Ninth alone spans California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and Hawaii. A favorable ruling in either circuit could break open the logjam of state resistance.
The broader legal effort extends beyond voter rolls. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division under Dhillon has framed its work as enforcing existing law, not creating new mandates. Breitbart reported that Dhillon said the division, acting under the leadership of President Trump and Attorney General Bondi, is working "to protect equal and transparent ballot access with vigilance and resolve." She also stated, "Our job is to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat."
That formulation, easier to vote, harder to cheat, is precisely the balance most Americans say they want. Polling has consistently shown broad public support for basic voter ID requirements and clean rolls. The resistance is concentrated among political officials and advocacy groups who treat any verification effort as a threat to voting rights rather than a protection of them.
The legal architecture for this campaign traces back to March 2025, when President Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government's Election Assistance Commission to update its voter registration form to require proof of citizenship. That order set the stage for the DOJ's subsequent demands for voter data and its willingness to litigate when states refused.
The administration's election-integrity posture has extended well beyond voter rolls. Federal investigators have probed election operations at the county level, and the DOJ has engaged in legal battles over redistricting maps that touch on fair representation.
Fox News reported that the voter-roll access push is part of a broader Trump administration election-integrity effort, with Dhillon's "Sunday Morning Futures" appearance serving as the most detailed public accounting yet of what the DOJ has found.
States across the country have also moved independently to tighten voting safeguards. New Hampshire recently enacted a law requiring government-issued ID to vote, closing a loophole that had allowed student IDs. These state-level efforts complement the federal push, though they also highlight how uneven the patchwork of election security remains.
The open questions are significant. The DOJ has reviewed 60 million records, but the United States has well over 160 million registered voters. If the rate of dead registrants and flagged non-citizens holds across the remaining rolls, the national totals would be staggering. We do not yet know the names of all 29 states being sued, the specific court dockets involved, or the identity of the person indicted in Minnesota.
We also do not know how many of those 25,000 flagged individuals actually voted. That answer will determine whether this is a record-keeping failure or something far more consequential. Dhillon's referral to Homeland Security suggests the DOJ takes the question seriously enough to involve immigration enforcement.
What we do know is that 29 states and the District of Columbia refused to let the federal government check their work. Some of those states may have legitimate procedural objections. But when the DOJ finds 350,000 dead people on the rolls from just a partial review, the burden shifts. The question is no longer whether there is a problem. It is whether the states blocking access want the problem fixed, or prefer not to know.
Clean voter rolls are not a partisan issue. They are a basic obligation of self-government. When states treat federal oversight as a threat instead of a safeguard, it is the voters, the living, lawful, American ones, who pay the price.
