It’s no secret that voter confidence in the integrity of our elections has been eroding for some time. A Gallup survey conducted just before the last presidential election found that only 57 percent of Americans believed that the votes for president would be accurately counted. The legacy news media routinely blame this phenomenon on “election deniers,” yet studiously ignore the large number of states that flout federal election laws requiring officials to maintain clean voter registration rolls and make them available for public inspection.
In short, the liberal establishment in this country has actively created an election integrity crisis by refusing to comply with federal law and then calling conservatives conspiracy theorists for noticing.
This problem has become so rampant that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been forced to file lawsuits against 14 Democrat-dominated states pursuant to persistent violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). NVRA requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls by conducting regular list maintenance to remove ineligible voters. HAVA builds on that framework by mandating statewide voter registration databases and verification procedures to help election officials identify and correct outdated, duplicate, or invalid registrations.
On Friday, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon announced in a video posted on X that her office is suing states that have knowingly failed to comply with those laws. “Now, we have 15 lawsuits pending against 14 states,” Dhillon wrote. “That’s right—California got sued twice—and we are in litigation with them. They’re refusing to provide their records.”
The list of the states that the DOJ had to sue will surprise no one: California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. North Carolina finally relented in September, and a federal court approved a consent decree in which the Tar Heel State agreed to remove approximately 100,000 people who remained on its voter rolls without identifying information required by federal law. Dhillon said another 12 states are cooperating:
“We sued North Carolina early on, and they are checking the voter records of 100,000 voters who were improperly enrolled on their voter rolls, and they’re going to fix their problem. Voluntarily, we have an agreement in place with almost another dozen states, and I expect very soon we’ll be looking at their voter data and comparing it with our records and helping them clean up those voter rolls.”
Despite very reluctant and dilatory cooperation from the states, Dhillon revealed that the DOJ has already made some disturbing discoveries: “We’ve found 260,000-plus dead people enrolled in the states’ voter rolls, which is pretty concerning. They’re going to be removed with the help of the DOJ.” She added, “There are several thousand non-citizens who are enrolled to vote in federal elections. This is very concerning, and the DOJ is partnering with local law enforcement where appropriate to prosecute people who have unlawfully voted in our elections.”
All of which raises the following question: What legitimate objection would any state have to a Justice Department audit of its voter rolls? It’s not as if the laws invoked by Assistant A.G. Dhillon are new. The NVRA was passed in 1993 and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. HAVA was passed in 2002 and signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.
Nor do the audits impose a financial burden. HAVA even provides federal funds to states to offset costs. The following shows how much money these 14 states received in 2024:
The taxpayers are shelling out $2.1 million for election integrity, yet these states ignore federal law, and their election officials refuse to do their job.
So, if NVRA and HAVA have been on the books for decades, both require states to maintain accurate voter registration rolls while making them available for public inspection, and the states are provided with federal funds to do all this, what’s the problem? It’s difficult to escape the impression that the above-named states have something to hide. If the DOJ has already found so many dead people and non-citizens on the voter rolls of relatively cooperative states, what are they likely to find in a state like California, where something as simple as requiring voters to show an ID is literally illegal?
The responses from some of the states tell the tale. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) called DOJ’s lawsuit a fishing expedition: “The U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to utilize the federal court system to erode the rights of the State of California and its citizens by trying to intimidate California officials into giving up the private and personal information of 23 million California voters.”
How precisely does an audit of the Golden State’s voter registration rolls put these voters at risk? Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) tries to explain:
“This baseless, partisan lawsuit is about one thing: restricting the right to vote in order to undermine our democracy. Whether it’s combing through personal voter information or threatening to prosecute hardworking election officials, Donald Trump and his Administration will stop at nothing … Now he’s weaponizing the Department of Justice in a clear attempt to purge eligible citizens from voter rolls.”
Nice try, Senator. It’s obviously illegal to “purge eligible voters from voter rolls” unless they reside in Forest Lawn or they have been deported by ICE to some third-world hellhole—like San Francisco. This is why there is so much erosion in voter confidence in the integrity of our elections.
It is increasingly obvious that the Democrats must and will continue to resort to election skullduggery in order to retain their tenuous grasp on political power.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
