The Department of Justice has found at least 350,000 dead people on voter rolls across the jurisdictions it has reviewed so far, 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 laid out those numbers on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures," calling the state of America's voter rolls a "mess" and warning that the federal government's review is far from finished.
Dhillon told host Maria Bartiromo that DOJ has processed 60 million voter records to date. The results paint a picture of widespread noncompliance with federal election law, and of states that, in many cases, are actively refusing to cooperate.
The numbers alone should trouble anyone who believes elections ought to be decided by living, eligible American citizens. But the DOJ's effort to clean up the rolls has met fierce resistance. Dhillon told Bartiromo that she is now suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over voter rolls, records to which the attorney general is entitled under the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
Dhillon's account was specific. She described a federal government that ran tens of millions of records and found systemic failures in the states tasked with maintaining accurate voter rolls:
"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 phrase matters. DOJ does not yet know how many of those 25,000 individuals actually cast ballots. The referral to DHS is designed to answer that question. But the sheer scale of the problem, a quarter-million dead registrants in just the first batch of records reviewed, suggests that voter-roll maintenance across the country has been neglected for years.
For years, the political left insisted that noncitizen voting was a myth, a talking point unworthy of serious attention. Dhillon addressed that claim 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."
The Trump administration has pushed hard on election integrity since taking office. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the Election Assistance Commission to update the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship. That order set the stage for the broader review Dhillon now leads out of the Civil Rights Division.
The legislative push for election integrity has moved in parallel, with the Senate advancing the SAVE America Act through weekend votes as the administration presses for stronger safeguards before the midterms.
Dhillon singled out Minnesota as a case study in how state-level rules can undermine federal election safeguards. She said 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.
Dhillon described the state's registration process in blunt terms:
"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."
The Minnesota indictment is not an isolated episode. A Minnesota man faces felony charges after allegedly voting in the 2024 election as a noncitizen, a concrete example of the kind of case Dhillon described.
The vouching system she referenced allows a registered voter to personally attest to another person's eligibility at the polls. Dhillon's position is that this practice conflicts with the Help America Vote Act, the federal law that set minimum standards for election administration after the 2000 election debacle. Whether courts agree will likely be tested in the months ahead.
The legal fight over voter-roll access has become one of the largest election-law confrontations in recent memory. Dhillon said she is suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to turn over voter rolls. The legal authority she cited is the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which grants the attorney general the right to inspect and copy election records.
Dhillon framed the refusals as obstruction of a lawful federal review:
"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."
But the administration has not had a clear path in court. In several cases, federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration's efforts to compel states to hand over the records. Dhillon acknowledged those setbacks while signaling that the DOJ 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 Ninth Circuit, which covers much of the western United States, and the Sixth Circuit, which covers several midwestern and southern states, will now become the next battleground. The outcomes there could determine whether the federal government can complete its review of voter rolls nationwide, or whether states can continue to stonewall.
The Supreme Court is already weighing related election-law disputes, including whether late-arriving ballots violate federal law, a sign that the judiciary's role in election integrity is only growing.
Consider the scale. DOJ has reviewed 60 million records so far. The United States has roughly 160 million registered voters. If the rate of dead registrants and missing citizenship documentation holds across the remaining records, the final tally could dwarf the already striking numbers Dhillon reported.
The DOJ's stated goal is compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, federal laws that require states to maintain accurate voter rolls and remove ineligible registrants. These are not obscure statutes. They are foundational to the integrity of every election held in this country.
Yet 29 states and the District of Columbia have refused to cooperate with the federal review. That is a majority of states choosing to fight the federal government rather than open their books. Voters deserve to ask a simple question: what are those states hiding?
Broader concerns about election integrity have also drawn attention from the intelligence community. DNI Tulsi Gabbard has led an investigation into 2020 election fraud concerns, reflecting the administration's view that past irregularities warrant serious scrutiny, not dismissal.
Dhillon's interview raised as many questions as it answered. She did not identify which 29 states are being sued. She did not say which jurisdictions were covered by the 60 million records already reviewed. And the critical question, how many of the 25,000 individuals referred to DHS actually voted, remains open. DHS has been asked to "dig into that further," but no results have been disclosed.
The identity of the person indicted in Minnesota was not provided. Nor did Dhillon specify which federal judges ruled against the administration or in which cases. Those details will matter as the appeals move forward.
Meanwhile, the FBI's investigation into election irregularities in Fulton County, Georgia, adds another data point to the growing federal effort to examine what happened, and what continues to happen, with American elections.
What is not in dispute is the basic math. Hundreds of thousands of dead people remain on voter rolls. Tens of thousands of registrants have no citizenship records on file. And a majority of states would rather go to court than let the federal government check.
Clean voter rolls are not a partisan wish. They are a legal requirement and a baseline condition of self-government. When states refuse to maintain them, and then refuse to let anyone else look, the people paying the price are the lawful voters whose ballots may be diluted by fraud, error, or neglect.
If 350,000 dead registrants in a partial review doesn't qualify as a mess, it's hard to imagine what would.