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For years, Americans have been told that voter fraud is "rare" — so rare that it is not worth chasing. Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General running the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, has now dismantled that claim in public. Pressed with the familiar line that these crimes barely happen, Dhillon shut it down: the prosecutions, she says, are finally happening — and for the first time, they are happening at scale.
The numbers behind her are staggering. The Justice Department has reviewed between 50 and 60 million voter records that states voluntarily handed over, and found hundreds of thousands of ineligible and outdated registrations — including over 300,000 dead people still sitting on the voter rolls. "And that's just a slice of the voter rolls," Dhillon said.
The dead registrants are only part of what the review turned up. It also found tens of thousands of potential noncitizens on the rolls, and Dhillon says her team has already referred tens of thousands of those cases for federal prosecution. Each referral is checked against multiple databases and court records first, she explained, so that no one is accused wrongly — but where a noncitizen has voted in a federal election, the case goes to a U.S. Attorney's office, and some of those prosecutions are now being worked up.
The fight has now moved to the states that will not cooperate. The Justice Department has sued 29 states and Washington, D.C., demanding full, unredacted voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — the federal laws that require states to keep their lists current and to remove the dead, the moved and the ineligible. States resisting the demand are fighting in court to keep the federal government out of their registration data.
Dhillon's warning about why dirty rolls matter is blunt. "You could sign ballots for somebody else and fill them in," she said. "And that's easy when you have a system where there's no voter ID, right? Where ballots are being mailed to outdated voting lists. This is not a fiction or a fantasy." She points to Los Angeles County, which agreed in a 2017 lawsuit settlement that more than 1.1 million people on its rolls should not have been there.
All of this lands while Senate Democrats continue to block the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and a government-issued photo ID to vote in federal elections. The Justice Department's position is that it will not wait for cleaner laws to enforce the ones already on the books. The "it never happens" era, Dhillon is saying, is over — the referrals are made, the lawsuits are filed, and the prosecutions are coming.
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