Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states on July 7, warning that any official who "knowingly" keeps noncitizens on voter rolls or allows noncitizens to cast ballots could face criminal prosecution. The letters gave states five days to explain how they're complying with federal voter eligibility law. They cited the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act. The deadline falls on July 12, less than four months before the November midterm elections.

1. The Threats Are Legitimate Enforcement (Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ)

The DOJ says it found real problems in state voter rolls and has both the authority and the obligation to act.

Hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters are still on the rolls. Dhillon has said DOJ found more than 350,000 dead voters still on the rolls and referred roughly 25,000 individuals with no citizenship records to the Department of Homeland Security, based on a review of 60 million voter records. Dhillon calls those numbers proof the rolls need cleaning.

The DOJ says it can prosecute, not just sue. Dhillon wrote: "In addition to the Civil Rights Division's authority to seek injunctive relief for violations of these laws, we are also authorized to prosecute criminal violations." The DOJ memo also argues that the NVRA's 90-day rule barring systematic voter purges before an election doesn't cover noncitizens, because they were never eligible to register.

2. This Is Pre-Midterm Intimidation (Adrian Fontes, Francisco Aguilar, Jocelyn Benson)

State officials say they're already doing their jobs, and the criminal threat is political, not legal.

The letters are "political rhetoric or intimidation," not enforcement. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said it was "insulting to insinuate that county recorders' offices across the state are not doing their jobs correctly." Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar was blunter: this is "just another attempt from the Trump Administration to create doubt surrounding our elections just ahead of the midterms."

Michigan offered to explain its process again. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office said it has been "open and transparent" about its safeguards and would provide documentation again "to help address any confusion." Georgia's office said it had "led the nation in keeping American elections for American citizens only" and had completed a comprehensive review months ago.

The DOJ sent the letters to generic public-facing inboxes. Jessica Huseman, Votebeat's editorial director, reported that some states initially couldn't find the letters because they went to generic agency addresses, not to officials directly. That is not how an agency behaves when it expects to follow through on criminal charges.

3. Noncitizen Voting Is Effectively Nonexistent (David Becker, Rick Hasen, CEIR)

Experts say the problem the DOJ is threatening to prosecute over barely exists — and the real risk is legitimate voters getting purged.

The actual numbers are tiny. Michigan's own secretary of state found 16 credible cases of noncitizen voting out of 5.7 million votes cast — 0.00028%. Georgia found 20 noncitizens registered out of 8.2 million voters. A 2017 Brennan Center study of 42 jurisdictions found noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

Big initial claims regularly shrink. The Center for Election Innovation and Research's February 2026 report found that claims of large numbers of noncitizen registrants are "revised significantly downward after proper investigation" due to mismatched or outdated data. Iowa initially claimed 2,176 potential noncitizens on its rolls; after proper review, that number fell to 277. David Becker, CEIR's executive director, and Rick Hasen, a UCLA election law professor, both called concerns about noncitizen voting exaggerated.

The criminal threat is pushing administrators to over-purge. Election administrators are now under pressure to aggressively clean rolls to avoid prosecution — and that could knock eligible citizens off the rolls if their citizenship records are stale or out of date. Huseman reported that officials weren't particularly concerned about the legal threat itself, but found the workload frustrating.

Where This Lands

Dhillon says the DOJ found genuine problems and has statutory authority to prosecute officials who knowingly allow noncitizen voting. State officials in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan are refusing to treat the letters as legitimate enforcement, calling them election-year intimidation. Election experts say the underlying problem — noncitizen votes actually being cast and counted — shows up in the low single digits per state, not the thousands the DOJ's announcement implied. The five-day response deadline falls July 12, and nobody knows what the DOJ will do with the answers it gets.

Sources