The Department of Justice has found at least 350,000 dead people on voter rolls across the jurisdictions it has reviewed so far and referred roughly 25,000 individuals with no citizenship records to the Department of Homeland Security, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said Sunday on Fox News.

Dhillon told "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo that the federal government has run 60 million voter records to date, and the picture that emerged is one of widespread noncompliance with federal election law. The DOJ is now suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over voter registration lists the department says it is legally entitled to inspect.

The numbers alone tell a story that state officials apparently did not want told. Three hundred fifty thousand dead registrants. Twenty-five thousand names with no matching citizenship documentation. And those figures come from a review that has not yet reached every state in the country.

What Dhillon said on the record

Dhillon, appearing on Fox News, laid out the scope of the problem in plain terms:

"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."

That last phrase matters. The DOJ is not simply flagging outdated records. It is asking DHS to determine whether people who should never have been registered actually cast ballots. The referral suggests the department believes the problem extends beyond clerical neglect into potential illegal voting.

Dhillon also pushed back directly on the longstanding progressive claim that non-citizen voting is a myth. She said she has been in contact with voting-rights activists who have shown her evidence of non-citizens casting ballots.

"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."

For years, critics who raised concerns about non-citizen voting were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Now a senior DOJ official says the data backs them up. That shift deserves more attention than it is getting.

Minnesota's 'vouching' law draws federal scrutiny

Dhillon singled out Minnesota for a practice she called inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act. The state allows citizens to vouch for one another's citizenship, a system Dhillon described bluntly. She noted that someone was recently indicted in Minnesota for voting without being a citizen and said she has sent a document request to the state regarding the case.

"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."

A state that lets one citizen vouch for another's eligibility, with no documentary proof required, is a state that has built a loophole into its election system. That a federal indictment has already come out of Minnesota suggests the loophole is not theoretical. It is being exploited.

The broader pattern is familiar. States adopt loose verification rules in the name of access and inclusion. When those rules produce exactly the kind of fraud they were warned about, officials act surprised. Meanwhile, every illegal vote cast cancels out a lawful one, and the citizens whose votes get diluted have no recourse. That dynamic has also played out in states like Kansas, where lawmakers have moved to tighten voter-roll maintenance and mail-in voting rules.

A legal campaign across 29 states

The lawsuits represent the enforcement arm of the administration's election-integrity push. Dhillon said the Civil Rights Act of 1960 entitles the attorney general to obtain voter registration records for inspection. The states being sued have refused to comply.

"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."

The Washington Examiner reported that the DOJ sued Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Utah, and West Virginia for failing to provide complete voter registration lists. Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the campaign in direct terms: "Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve."

The AP reported that the department also sued Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, all states with Democratic leadership, over their refusal to provide statewide voter registration data. Several Democratic officials have objected to turning over what they describe as private voter information.

Dhillon addressed that resistance in a separate Newsmax interview, where she said the DOJ would pursue each case to its conclusion. "If you had nothing to hide, then you wouldn't hide it," she said of the states refusing to cooperate.

That line cuts to the core of the standoff. If voter rolls are clean, producing them costs a state nothing but a few hours of staff time. The refusal to hand them over, especially when federal law authorizes the request, invites the obvious question: what are these states protecting?

Courts push back, DOJ pushes harder

The legal road has not been smooth. Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration in several of the voter-roll cases. But Dhillon made clear the DOJ is not backing down. She said the department is expediting its appeals.

"We're expediting the appeals in these cases. There'll be an appeal in the Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] and the Sixth Circuit soon."

A federal judge's rejection of the DOJ's lawsuit seeking Michigan voter registration data earlier this year illustrated the kind of resistance the department faces in court. But the administration's strategy appears to be volume and speed, file broadly, appeal fast, and force the issue up through the circuit courts.

That approach carries risk. Appellate courts could side with the states, and the Ninth Circuit in particular has not been friendly terrain for conservative legal arguments. But the DOJ's position rests on a statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, that explicitly grants the attorney general access to election records. The legal text is not ambiguous.

Fox News covered the DOJ's legal campaign as part of a broader segment on the department's voting-integrity efforts, underscoring that the fight over voter rolls has become a defining issue for the administration's civil-rights division.

The executive order and proof of citizenship

The litigation fits within a broader framework. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Election Assistance Commission to update the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship. That order signaled the administration's intent to treat voter-roll accuracy as a federal enforcement priority, not merely a state-level housekeeping task.

The combination of the executive order and the DOJ's lawsuit campaign amounts to a two-front effort: tighten the front door through proof-of-citizenship requirements, and audit the back end by forcing states to open their rolls to federal review.

Democrats in Congress have shown little appetite for either approach. Every Senate Democrat voted against a photo ID requirement aimed at preventing election fraud, a position that grows harder to defend as the DOJ's record review turns up hundreds of thousands of dead registrants and thousands of names with no citizenship documentation.

What remains unanswered

Dhillon's interview raised as many questions as it answered. She did not identify which jurisdictions were included in the 60 million records reviewed so far. She did not name the 29 states being sued. She did not provide case names or docket numbers for the pending appeals. And the identity of the person indicted in Minnesota for voting without citizenship remains undisclosed.

The standard used to flag the approximately 25,000 people referred to DHS, "no citizenship records", also deserves clarification. Does that mean no record exists anywhere in federal databases, or simply that the records were not matched in a particular system? The distinction matters for evaluating the scale of the problem.

Those gaps do not undermine Dhillon's core point. They do, however, mean the public is relying on official claims that have not yet been independently verified at the case level. The DOJ's credibility on this issue will ultimately rest on what the appeals courts decide and what DHS finds when it digs into those 25,000 referrals. Previous DOJ officials have described firsthand encounters with election mismanagement that lend weight to the department's broader concerns.

The real cost of dirty voter rolls

The people who pay for this mess are not politicians or bureaucrats. They are the voters who follow the rules, who register lawfully, show up on Election Day, and trust that their vote carries equal weight. Every dead registrant left on a roll is an opportunity for fraud. Every non-citizen who casts a ballot cancels out a lawful vote. Every state that refuses to open its books to federal review is choosing opacity over accountability.

Dhillon said she would not rest until the project is complete. Given the resistance from 29 states and a string of hostile lower-court rulings, that promise will be tested. But the numbers she put on the record, 350,000 dead registrants, 25,000 referrals, 60 million records and counting, are now part of the public debate.

The left spent years insisting the voter rolls were fine. The DOJ just showed the receipts.