National Voter Registration Act Archives

DOJ’s Harmeet Dhillon Details Just How Much of a ‘Mess’ Voter Rolls Are

April 21, 2026/in Courts & Law, Criminal Illegal Aliens, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, News, Social Issues, Voter REAL ID/by The Daily Signal

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that federal officials discovered tens of thousands of dead people and non-citizens on voting rolls.

The Trump administration has sued multiple states for failing to turn over voter rolls to the Department of Justice, which is seeking to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and other federal laws aimed at protecting the right to vote. Dhillon told Bartiromo that, even in states trying to comply with the laws, issues concerning voting eligibility were still being identified.

“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,” Dhillon told Bartiromo. “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.”

“Just recently, someone was indicted in Minnesota, of all places, for voting without being a citizen, and so I’ve sent a document request to them on that,” Dhillon continued. “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.”

Dhillon also noted that, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1960 giving the attorney general access to voting rolls to ensure compliance with the law, multiple states have refused to hand them over.

“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,” Dhillon told Bartiromo, later adding that, in several cases, federal judges ruled against the Trump administration.

“We’re expediting the appeals in these cases,” Dhillon said. “There’ll be an appeal in the Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] and the Sixth Circuit soon.”

President Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 requiring the federal government’s Election Assistance Commission to update its voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.

Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

Harold Hutchison

Harold Hutchison is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

DOJ Review of Voter Rolls Uncovers Alarming Names—and It’s Only the Beginning

March 12, 2026/in America 250, Election Fraud, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Social Media, The Truth, Voter REAL ID, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Signal

The Justice Department is finding thousands of noncitizens and dead people on voter rolls as it pursues more state election records, said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in an interview.

“We’re finding tens of thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls, hundreds of thousands of dead people on the voter rolls, and duplicate registrations between states,” Dhillon said on “Just the News, No Noise.”

Dhillon based her claim on a review of only 16 Republican-leaning states, such as Florida and Texas, that voluntarily complied with the Justice Department’s request for the election records.

The administration is suing 29 states for the records, seeking to ensure that states are complying with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Those laws require states to update their voter registration lists and ensure they are free of names of dead people, or people who no longer reside in jurisdictions where they are registered to vote.

This comes in light of several prosecutions of noncitizens for illegal voting.

This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI announced the arrest of Mahady Sacko, an illegal alien from Mauritania, for voter fraud in Philadelphia. ICE asserted he had been illegally voting in the United States since 2008.

Sacko entered the U.S. near Miami, and an immigration judge ordered him removed. Sacko exhausted all appeals, and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld his removal on Nov. 14, 2002—over two decades ago.

In December, Joe Ceballos resigned as mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, after being arrested for voting multiple times, though he was not a citizen. The Department of Homeland Security announced removal proceedings but Ceballos, a legal permanent resident from Mexico, voted in multiple elections, according to the agency, and faced state charges.

The lawsuits contend the Justice Department has the authority to request and review election records under the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

The DOJ has sued both red and blue states. Most recently, the Justice Department sued Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and the Democrat-leaning New Jersey.

The Justice Department has also sued major Democrat-leaning states, such as California and New York, for voter rolls, as well as battleground states such as Arizona and Georgia.

“It’s really frustrating that we’re being prevented from doing our job,” Dhillon said.

The Justice Department could have a tough road ahead, noted J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group that has sued states for information on “dirty voter rolls.”

Adams is a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“It’s decades-old news,” Adams told The Daily Signal of dead voters and noncitizens on voter lists. “Good luck doing anything about it.”

He noted that in cases by the foundation, both the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled states can’t be compelled to clean up voter rolls if they are already making an effort. The Supreme Court declined to hear the cases.

“It’s one thing to get data, it’s another thing to enforce cleaning up the rolls,” Adams said.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to The Daily Signal by publication time to provide more details about the number of ineligible voters found on the voter lists so far.

AUTHOR

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. He is the author of “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Fred on X: @FredLucasWH.

Double Victory: Lawsuits to Clean Up Voter Rolls Advance in Two States

August 2, 2025/in Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Voter REAL ID/by Judicial Watch

In a double win for Judicial Watch and clean elections, federal courts in California and Illinois separately ruled this week that our lawsuits may proceed against those states to force them to clean up their dirty voter rolls.

Our lawsuits allege that both California and Illinois violated the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence.

In California, Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California sued after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of California counties. The amended complaint details that, in correspondence with us, California admitted that 21 counties removed five or fewer registrations in a two-year period pursuant to a key provision of federal law. Sixteen counties removed zero such registrations during that period (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-03750).

In Illinois, Judicial Watch and two political organizations, Breakthrough Ideas and Illinois Family Action, and registered voter Carol Davis, sued after alleging 23 counties, with a combined 980,089 registered voters, reported removing a combined total of just 100 voter registrations under a key provision of federal law over the past two-year period (Judicial Watch Inc. et al. v. Illinois State Board of Elections et al. (No. 1:24-cv-01867)).

In both cases, the judges allowed the lawsuits to continue.

The voter rolls in Illinois and California are a mess, and these court decisions allow our legal team to proceed in court to clean them up. The stakes are high—as there are potentially millions of ineligible names on the voter rolls in these two states.

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys. Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

We announced in May that our work led to the removal of more than five million ineligible names from voter rolls nationwide.

Recently, the Commonwealth of Kentucky reported that 735,000 ineligible voter registrations had been removed from its voter rolls since 2019 by the State Board of Elections as part of its 2018 consent decree settling a lawsuit by Judicial Watch.

As part of its 2022 settlement, New York City alone has removed 918,139 ineligible names from its rolls. Recent data show 477,056 removals between March 2023 and February 2025, which is in addition to the 441,083 previously reported removals.

In July, we filed an opening brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in a case filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors, who are before the court to vindicate their standing to challenge an Illinois law extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law (Rep. Michael J. Bost, Laura Pollastrini, and Susan Sweeney v. The Illinois State Board of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No. 1:22-cv-02754, 23-2644, 24-568)).

In June, we announced that the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in our lawsuit that calls on Oregon’s secretary of state to make “a reasonable effort to remove” the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls as required by federal law (Judicial Watch, et al. v. The State of Oregon et al. (No. 6:24-cv-01783)).

House Passes Bill Aiming To Keep Illegal Immigrants From Voting

July 11, 2024/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Immigration, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

The House passed a bill on Wednesday that requires proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act is an amendment to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 that requires proof of citizenship “to register an individual to vote in elections for Federal office,” according to the bill text. The bill, which was introduced by Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, passed the House 221-198.

Five Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the bill.

“We will only be able to keep this republic as a republic as long as our citizenship as Americans remains meaningful,” Roy said in a press release following the bill’s passage. “That’s why I introduced the SAVE Act in the first place, and it’s why the People’s House passed it today.”

The bill establishes criminal penalties for election officials who register voters without enforcing the requirement to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Additionally, the bill requires noncitizens to be removed from official lists of eligible voters.

The Biden Administration released a statement in opposition to the bill on Monday, claiming that states “already have effective safeguards in place to verify voter’s eligibility and maintain accuracy of voter rolls.”

“This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said. “The evidence is clear that the current laws to prevent noncitizen voting are working as intended — it is extraordinarily rare for noncitizens to break the law by voting in Federal elections.”

Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday that Democrats are trying to “mislead” Americans about election integrity efforts because “they want illegals to vote in our elections.”

“They’re claiming to oppose the bill because they say it’s going to make it harder to vote,” Johnson said during a press conference. “But they know that that is not true. Many of the Democrats want all of these illegals to participate in our federal elections. They want them to vote. There’s no other conclusion that you could draw. When the White House announced that they would veto the bill they effectively handed our elections over to all of these illegal aliens that have come here.”

California Rep. Jennifer McClellan said on Wednesday that the bill is “the 2024 version of the Jim Cow poll tax.”

“Let me be clear, they don’t want you to vote. ” Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania said during a floor speech. “They don’t want to hear black voices, brown voices, LGBTQIA voices, young voices. Our fundamental access to our democracy is being politicized. And this xenophobic attack that we are debating today will make it harder for Americans to vote.”

The bill was cosponsored by over 100 Republican lawmakers including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida.

AUTHOR

REBEKA ZELJKO

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Democrats To Formally Oppose GOP Effort To Block DC Law That Allows Non-Citizens To Vote: REPORT

Over 140 Dems Vote Against DC Bill Repealing Law Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Judicial Watch Sues California to Force Clean-Up of Voting Rolls

May 10, 2024/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Judicial Watch

Washington, D.C. — Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a lawsuit to force California to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to compel the defendants to comply with their voter list maintenance obligations under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

The National Voter Registration Act requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. The law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections.

In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory. In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since the year before, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017. (Legal pressure from Judicial Watch ultimately led to the removal of up to four million ineligible voters from voter rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere.)

Judicial Watch filed the latest lawsuit after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of California counties.

The complaint details that, in correspondence with Judicial Watch, that California:

admit[ted] that 21 California counties removed five or fewer registrations pursuant to [the NVRA] … for failing to respond to a Confirmation Notice and then failing to vote in two general federal elections … from November 2020 to November 2022. Sixteen of the 21 counties removed zero such registrations during this period. The 21 counties are: Alameda (1 such removal), Alpine (0), Calaveras (0), Imperial (0), Lake (1), Modoc (0), Placer (0), Plumas (0), San Benito (0), San Bernardino (0), San Luis Obispo (5), San Mateo (0), Santa Barbara (0), Santa Cruz (0), Shasta (0), Siskiyou (2), Solano (0), Stanislaus (0), Trinity (0), Ventura (0), and Yolo (2).

Together, these 21 counties reported a combined total of 11 removals under Section 8(d)(1)(B) during this two-year reporting period.

The complaint notes that “these 21 counties contain about 22% of the population of California.” The lawsuit alleges that, in Judicial Watch’s experience “based on years of enforcing the NVRA,” there “is no possible way any county” with such “absurdly small” removal numbers can be complying with the NVRA’s requirement “to cancel the registrations of voters who have become ineligible because of a change of residence.” The complaint points out that about 11.6% of California residents move each year, and that in the last year for which data are available (2022) “about 818,000 California residents moved out of state.”

The Judicial Watch lawsuit also points out that another 16 California counties could not even “tell how many registrations were removed pursuant to [the NVRA] … The 16 counties are: Del Norte, El Dorado, Inyo, Kern, Lassen, Marin, Mendocino, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Orange, Riverside, San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Sonoma, and Tulare.” These 16 counties together “contain about 28% of the population of California.”

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. And California’s voting rolls continue to be a mess,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch litigation already caused the state to remove over a million outdated names from the rolls in California but our new lawsuit shows there is more work to do.”

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in across the country, among other achievements.

Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

In March 2023, Judicial Watch filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois’ voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law.

Judicial Watch in February 2024 filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, challenging a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as long as five business days after Election Day.

In December 2023, Judicial Watch sent notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, D.C., officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”

In July 2023, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361)). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.

In a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch in July 2023 settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, obtaining access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state.

In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with Judicial Watch and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.

In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle a Judicial Watch NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.

Judicial Watch settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.

Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, Judicial Watch settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Judicial Watch: Voicemail Recording Shows FBI and Secret Service Coordination on Raid of Trump’s Home

FARRELL: CNN Admits Bragg Has ZERO Evidence of Trump Crime!

Fani Willis Fails to Answer Public Records Lawsuit – Judicial Watch Files Motion for ‘Default Judgment’

WAS THE 2020 ELECTION STOLEN!?

POST ON X:

Concerning https://t.co/PSIRZMZ01i

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 10, 2024

Nevada Hit With GOP Lawsuit Over ‘Impossibly High’ Voter Registration

March 21, 2024/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller Report

Lara Trump is doing the heavy lifting.

Very impressive right out of the gate.

Can real reform come before November?

State Official Faces Lawsuit From GOP Over ‘Impossibly High’ Voter Registration

BY: Daily Caller, March 19, 2024;

Story continues below advertisement

The Republican National Committee (RNC) slapped Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguliar with a lawsuit on Friday, alleging that the state has “impossibly high” voter registration rolls.

The lawsuit alleges that the state of Nevada is failing to maintain the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) which mandates that voter rolls must keep “clean and accurate voter registration records.” The RNC is alleging that according to their analysis, five of Nevada’s 17 counties have inflated voter rolls which they say indicates a violation of the NVRA, the lawsuit claims.

“Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls, and that’s why the National Voter Registration Act requires state officials to keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date,” RNC Co-Chair Michael Whatley wrote in a Monday press release. “Nevada has universal mail voting and no voter ID requirement, which makes Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s failure to comply with the NVRA and provide accurate voter rolls all the more concerning. Securing clean voter rolls in Nevada is a critical step towards ensuring that it will be easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

“At least three Nevada counties have more registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” the lawsuit alleges. “That number of voters is impossibly high.”

The lawsuit alleges that two counties in Nevada have active voter registration rates that surpass 90% of adult citizens over the age of 18. That number, the RNC alleges in its lawsuit, “far eclipses” the voter registration rate nationwide and at the state-level in elections recently…

Continue reading.

AUTHOR