The Justice Department’s efforts are targeting states on the battlefield. That follows the executive order in March.
Judge blocks Trump’s executive order regarding voting
A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to request evidence of citizenship on the voter registration form.
FOX -LA
The Justice Department is moving forward state by state to scrutinize how officials manage voter roles and eliminate unqualified voters.
The effort has so far focused on battlefield states, following President Donald Trump’s widely challenged executive order in March, creating new requirements for voting, supporting various voting policies Republicans have long supported.
In roughly the same letter as state election officials in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the Department of Justice asked them to explain how they identify felons, fatalities, non-residents or non-citizens.
A letter to Arizona officials said the state should require that anyone with a driver’s license number register to use that number to vote, rather than the last four digits of a Social Security number. The Justice Department said the office should review voter files.
The department also sued Orange County, California because it did not provide sufficient identification information to respond to record requests. It filed documents in support of the lawsuit filed by the right-leaning group judicial clock, which states that Illinois and Oregon are not excluding enough people from the voter’s role.
“It is important to remove unqualified voters from the registration role from the registration role, and to ensure that elections take place fairly, accurately and without fraud,” said Hermet K. Dillon, Attorney General of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Office. She said the state would “hardly enforce” federal laws requiring “to implement a robust list maintenance program.”
Several states in question have had competitive elections in November 2026. This includes a third of all seats in the House and Senate seats on the vote. Minnesota is racing with Senate seats open. Arizona and Pennsylvania have multiple competitive house races, with tough races for California house seats, including parts of Orange County.
Americans are more likely to be hit by lightning than committing in-person voter fraud, according to a study by Brennan Justice for Justice, a nonpartisan, good government group based at New York University.
“We’re a voting advocacy director at Campaign Legal Center,” said Jonathan Dias, Voting Advocacy Director at Campaign Legal Center. “So they can make some stories about how voter roles in these states are unreliable, so if Democrats win, they can’t trust their election outcome.”
Trump’s March executive order argued that the previous administration did not do enough to maintain the non-citizens of voters’ roles, saying it would protect voters by making voters accurate.
What DOJ wants to do in lawsuits
In Orange County, the Department of Justice wrote in a federal lawsuit in June that the Attorney General had received a complaint about non-citizens who were voted on, and that he requested five years of data on how the county would remove non-citizens from the voter registration role.
The county provided information, but according to the lawsuit, they compiled the number of identifications and signatures, among other things. The Justice Department says it is illegal and it wants federal courts to provide the county with full information.
Diaz said the Justice Department in general “wants a lot of very specific data about individual voters that are not normally needed.” He said the information is much more specific than what the state offers political campaigns and journalists.
The Justice Department also asked Nevada and Minnesota to copy the statewide voter registration list with both active and inactive voters. Inactive voters are generally not voted in recent elections and are on the inactive list to maintain their registration while lining up for future removals.
Diaz said the request was written “like a fishing expedition.” He predicts that the Justice Department may find human error, such as non-citizens who check for the wrong boxes when voting for driver’s licenses and registrations, and “make that a referendum across the entire electoral system.”
“They are looking for something they can find, so they can scream, whatever the non-citizen vote or the dead vote, or whatever the conspiracy theory of the day,” Diaz said.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a right-footed organisation defending government transparency, said many states are not enough to maintain a clean voter roll. He said his organization will sues multiple jurisdictions over the years to remove roughly five million names from voter roles, including New York City and Los Angeles.
Fitton said the voter registration list is “a pool of names that people with problematic intent attract to engage in fraud. And the emergence of dirty voting lists undermines voter trust and participation.”
The Conservative Heritage Foundation claims that there have been around 1,600 voter frauds over the years. This is comparable to the over 150 million people who voted in the 2024 presidential election alone.
Fitton admitted that to appearing to vote for someone else’s name, it would take a level of “Chutzpah” that “even political fraudsters could be a step too far.” He assumed that he was prone to impersonating a dead voter, but concluded, “It’s all speculation. The law requires names to be wiped out, and that’s not done.”
In a federal lawsuit in Oregon supported by the Department of Justice, judicial surveillance alleges that states have too many voter roles compared to the voting age population, and hopes federal courts will force the state to develop a new removal program. Oregon argues that the organization has no right to sue and has not proven it is harmed.
In Illinois, judicial oversight says 11 counties removed voter registrations between November 2020 and November 2022, with fewer than 15 counties removed during the same period. The lawsuit doesn’t claim that anyone voted illegally, but it questions whether there are few voters or whether they have died. The Illinois Election Commission declined to comment on the pending lawsuit.
“When Illinois voters vote, they should be convinced that their vote will be given the deserved weight that is not diluted by ineligible voters,” the Justice Department filed in the July 21 case. “This confidence is the foundation of participatory democracy.”
