by Christina Park
The Justice Department’s top election enforcement official has sent a pointed warning to all 50 states that election administrators can be criminally prosecuted if they knowingly allow noncitizens to vote in the upcoming 2026 election.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent the letters Tuesday after the U.S. government conducted reviews that found tens of thousands of noncitizens have made it onto state voter rolls, and DOJ prosecuted a handful of foreigners who voted in federal elections illegally, including an Australian citizen earlier this week.
“Every person who votes illegally that cancels your or my vote is one too many for me, and I think it should be for every citizen, because it’s a sacred right,” Dhillon told the Just the News, No Noise television show Wednesday night.
Dhillon’s letters give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and identify what steps they will take to maintain “clean voter lists” that remove noncitizens before Election Day.
“Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s SVRL or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,” reads the letter sent to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
The letters went to top election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They demand written responses within five days outlining exactly how each state will cross-reference voter rolls against federal citizenship and immigration databases, remove ineligible registrants on an ongoing basis, and ensure no noncitizen ballots are issued or counted in federal races. Dhillon’s team framed the outreach as both a compliance directive and an offer of technical support from the Civil Rights Division to help states meet their obligations under existing federal law.
Dhillon’s missive explicitly warns that knowingly retaining noncitizens on rolls or facilitating their voting could amount to aiding and abetting violations, exposing officials to criminal liability for procuring, casting, or tabulating false ballots. The correspondence also offers DOJ assistance in compliance efforts while pressing states to demonstrate proactive steps ahead of November.
The warning comes as the Trump administration makes a renewed push to get the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote.
Dhillon said her office had listed criminal punishments written into federal election laws such as the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
In the detailed correspondence, Dhillon’s team laid out specific mechanisms for list maintenance, cross-referencing with federal databases, and timely removal of ineligible voters. The letters stress that chief state election officers bear ultimate responsibility and could face prosecution for willful failures that undermine the integrity of federal contests. Dhillon framed the outreach as both a warning and an offer of partnership, urging states to view it as guidance to avoid inadvertent violations rather than an adversarial action.
“Look, I don’t want to scare anybody, but if that’s having the impact of fear, that means that some people are worried that they’re actually violating the law, and we want them to stop,” Dhillon said.
“I hope no prosecutions are necessary,” she added.
Moreover, Dhillon said that in states cooperating with the DOJ “cleanup of the voter rolls,” the DOJ had discovered “hundreds of thousands of dead people on the voter rolls,” as well as “tens of thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls.”
Recent data from individual states offers a closer look. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has identified around 34,000 dead people on the state’s voter rolls, while an ongoing audit in Ohio recently flagged 62 potential noncitizen registrations.
Meanwhile, Michigan has removed over 1.4 million registrations since 2019 to clear deceased voters.
Verifying the DOJ’s national figures remains difficult as the department is currently suing more than 20 states, including California, for refusing to turn over their unredacted voter files.
Dhillon said she was concerned that in large states like California, there could be “hundreds of thousands of people” on voter rolls who did not have citizenship records in the systems.
The DOJ also announced this week that it is dispatching election monitors to six states: Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia.
Dhillon said the monitors are being sent to counties and jurisdictions that have previously had problems during federal elections.
Dhillon noted Arizona experienced “glitches in their vote centers,” where roughly 20% of Maricopa County had problems with ballot on-demand printers, Apache County had “pretty much the whole voting system went down” and Detroit, suffered “extremely long lines around universities for students to have to wait to vote.”
Local officials have pushed back against DOJ election monitoring letters. Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey recently called the department’s rationale “thin gruel” and “false assertions that form a baseless conclusion.”
Dhillon pushed back against such criticisms, saying election crimes victimize lawful voters.
“There isn’t a culture of law enforcement caring about it. It’s viewed as a victimless crime. It is not a victimless crime,” she said. “We are trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, because there isn’t a culture of US attorneys’ offices going after this.”
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Christina Park is a reporter at Just the News. Executive Editor of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network Christina Botteri contributed to this report.
