Why Are Voter Rolls Not Clean Now?

 There have been many complaints about federal elections in recent years. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has been working for about a year on cleaning up voting rolls. As written in an article published in The Daily Signal, Harold Hutchison reported on an interview that Dhillon had on “Sunday Morning Futures” with host Maria Bartiromo. 

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.