DOJ's Election-Security Cops Are Back on the Beat
Are states resisting the Department of Justice's requests to see voter-list maintenance?
After years of all but ignoring states’ duty to maintain accurate voter rolls – the very foundation of trusted elections, the Department of Justice has election integrity cops back on the beat.
At the forefront of the effort are basic requests to review states’ voter rolls to ensure they are being maintained according to federal statute — and are removing ineligible noncitizens.
This is standard, follow-the-law stuff under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
But removing ineligible registrations, and ensuring noncitizens are off the rolls bring howls of voter suppression claims from the left – despite wide access to voter registration thanks to the NVRA statute.
The DOJ’s progress since March aligns with President Trump’s Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
The EO says:
Several Federal laws, including 18 U.S.C. 1015 and 611, prohibit foreign nationals from registering to vote or voting in Federal elections.
Yet States fail adequately to vet voters’ citizenship, and, in recent years, the Department of Justice has failed to prioritize and devote sufficient resources for enforcement of these provisions.
Even worse, the prior administration actively prevented States from removing aliens from their voter lists.
At least three lawsuits by left wing groups, including open border groups, are challenging parts of the Executive Order regarding documentary proof of citizenship to register.
While the litigation plays out, the DOJ and other agencies are wasting no time on other sections that address election law compliance.
Here’s a Partial Rundown:
--The Justice Department has sent letters to states requesting documentation of list-maintenance in compliance with NVRA as well as HAVA.
Its letter to Minnesota’s Secretary of State requests documentation to see how it removes duplicate registrations — required under HAVA.
It asks for records showing how they secure their systems from intrusion, and coordinate with other agencies to check accuracy, also HAVA requirements.
--In Orange County, California, election officials refused to provide full list-maintenance records after noncitizens reported they received “universal” absentee ballots in the mail. The DOJ filed a lawsuit to compel the list-maintenance records.
“Every single citizen has a right to believe that their vote matters and is counted equally with only other citizen votes,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights division, told Kelly Sadler of the Washington Times podcast.
“There should be a zero-tolerance policy for people voting in our elections who aren’t entitled to. Simply put. And so that is what we are trying to enforce here with this lawsuit.”
--The DOJ also filed suit against North Carolina’s elections board for failing to correct an estimated 200,000 illegal registrations the board accepted after it issued misleading voter-registration forms. A spokesman for the board said election board officials intend to address the faulty registrations.
--The Justice Department has also filed Statements of Interest in ongoing legal cases in other states, including Judicial Watch v. Illinois State Board of Elections, “to make their voter registration list available for public inspection.”
--It filed a Statement of Interest in Equality State Policy Center v. Chuck Gray “defending Wyoming’s legitimate interest securing its voting process from fraud by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.”
--In New Jersey, U.S. Attorney Alina Habba has launched a federal task force to review the state’s compliance with election statutes, and maintenance activities with voter records.
The Election Integrity Task Force’s objectives include prosecution for election crimes such as voter registration fraud, fraudulent balloting, voting by non-citizens, multiple voting, and foreign interference.
--Dhillon has requested records from Colorado’s Secretary of State to ensure compliance with statutes governing the preservation of election records – in a state where the post-2020 election records remain controversial.
The records may also bear on the case of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County registrar. She was sent to prison for nine years, in a highly politicized case, after she backed up election records before election software vendor Dominion’s 2021 “Trusted Build” software update all but wiped out 2020 election files.
In a related development, Colorado’s Arapahoe County election officials, without public notice, “quietly” revised 2020 Presidential Election Cast Vote Record data without explanation — as discovered by researchers.
See the full report here:
Policing Foreign Interference
Independent journalists have been raising questions for years about Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue’s lax standards with security codes that appeared to allow foreign donations in violation of federal laws.
Congressional investigators published a report in April showing evidence that “ActBlue made policy changes in 2024 that resulted in more fraudulent donations on the platform.”
A Republican political operative was even the victim of a scam that used ActBlue to make donations to left-leaning candidates and causes in the operative’s name,” according to The Federalist Society blog.
The White House also called for a probe of the party’s fundraising activities regarding “straw” donor activities and lax security standards:
Federal law (52 U.S.C. 30121 and 30122) strictly prohibits making political contributions in the name of another person, as well as contributions by foreign nationals.
--No wonder “Democrats fear a GOP legal blitz around the midterms,” Lauren Egan noted in her Substack newsletter “The Opposition.”
"Beyond the DNC’s coffers, there are additional fears about the election law battles to come. Among them is that the party is too reliant on one big law firm—Elias Law Group—to handle the bulk of the legal strategy and hasn’t invested enough in creating a network of lawyers in the states most likely to see GOP challenges,” Egan writes.
"The DNC also recently created a new litigation department, hiring Dan Freeman, a veteran of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, to lead a team of three lawyers. Freeman, who started in his role last week, told The Bulwark he plans to hire more lawyers in the coming months—describing it as a significant investment compared to just a few years ago, when the DNC did not employ any lawyers in-house."
Freeman’s recent fund-raising letter to potential donors highlights the partisan approach to election law enforcement that often held sway at the DOJ.
It’s Dan Freeman, the new Litigation Director at the DNC. I’m a former Department of Justice attorney, and now I’m joining the DNC to help protect your right to vote.
Here’s my story:
I spent almost 15 years at DOJ as a voting rights lawyer. I was a civil servant, and I loved enforcing the Voting Rights Act on behalf of the American people. I helped stop voter purges in Alabama and gerrymandering in Texas. But everything changed when President Trump returned to the White House.
“Voter purge” is the argument the left uses to fight the removal of deceased voters, even noncitizens from voter rolls.
In 2024, the Biden DOJ sided with leftwing progressives and open border groups who sued to stop the Commonwealth of Virginia from removing noncitizens from the rolls who had self-identified as ineligible.
A Biden-appointed federal judge ordered more than 1,600 of the noncitizens returned to the voter rolls before the Supreme Court issued a stay of the order.
“The people of Virginia have every right to insist that the number of non-citizens voting in their elections is zero,” said Derek Lyons, the (former) president of election-law firm RITE in an “Amicus” brief supporting Virginia’s appeal.
Voter List Verification Breakthroughs
For years, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division of the Department of Homeland Security, was considered the best source to cross-reference voter lists with immigration status.
After all, states are clearly allowing noncitizens to obtain drivers’ licenses.
In all but a handful of states, the NVRA’s “Motor Voter” voter-registration program is automated. Even when noncitizens answer “no” on the citizenship question, many are still enrolled.
States had to find naturalization numbers to check their voter lists against the SAVE database at DHS. It only allowed one search at a time; average cost, $9.
In April came a breakthrough.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, alongside USCIS and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), announced full integration of the SAVE database with Social Security information — a key identifier in voter registrations.
In a letter to DHS Sec. Noem, Public Interest Legal Foundation, a leading law firm on voter-roll integrity, said the tools serve a “critical humanitarian function for immigrants waiting their turn for naturalization.”
Over the last decade, the Foundation studied voter registration records belonging to foreign nationals across the nation. In every jurisdiction and disclosed sampling, the following trends demonstrated:
1. The vast majority became registered at the prompting of others – usually by state DMV employees or street canvassers;
2. Aliens mostly complained that foreign language barriers experienced in DMVs or on the street caused them to not understand what they were signing;
3. Those who were found to have voted usually thought that since their application was accepted and a voter ID card arrived in their mail, they believed they were deemed eligible to cast a ballot.
In a statement, PILF’s lead attorney J. Christian Adams added:
“Leftist media wants to paint SAVE as some new Minority Report style surveillance system of the Trump era. That’s nonsense. The SAVE system has operated since the 1980s to verify legal immigration status.
“There is no legal or technical reason to keep election officials locked out of a system that can prevent non-citizen registrations.”
In a sign of a new era at DOJ, or perhaps their last act of partisanship documented by the DOJ’s Inspector General report, some 200 DOJ attorneys recently departed the Civil Rights division rather than join an antisemitism task force Dhillon formed.
Dhillon told Bloomberg that her division has since received a deluge of applications to join the DOJ.
Apparently, more than a few people are willing to leave a “cushy” corporate law job and help the voting rights division apply election law evenly.
Or, in the case of common-sense, voter-list management, to add a few more cops to ensure that states are maintaining accurate — and trusted — voter rolls. #
Related:
See more about nonprofit voter-data analysis firm EPEC, which has documented more than 1,300 ballots cast by ineligible noncitizens before they are removed from rolls in Virginia.