The Justice Department has sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia warning that they could face criminal prosecution over possible noncitizen voting, putting a five-day clock on responses from the people who run the nation’s voter rolls. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent the letters on Tuesday, and the department said states must explain how they plan to comply with federal voter eligibility laws.
The move instantly put Harmeet Dhillon voting letters at the center of a national election fight because the demand reached every state at once. A DOJ spokesperson said the department was asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner, but the warning itself was stark: officials could be prosecuted if they knowingly keep noncitizens on the rolls or allow them to receive and cast ballots.
Copies reviewed by Democracy Docket were sent to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his office also received one, and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said she received a letter as well. The broad sweep matters because the Justice Department did not single out a handful of places; it touched every state and Washington, D.C., in one shot.
Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, wrote that any election officer, including a state’s chief election officer, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s SVRL or helps noncitizens receive and cast ballots could face criminal liability. The attached memo also said the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day quiet period does not apply when removing non-citizens who were never eligible to register in the first place, while acknowledging contrary authority from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
That is where the letters run into a hard problem. The department is threatening criminal exposure over noncitizen voting, yet Trump and his allies have not produced evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. The warning lands as courts have repeatedly rejected the administration’s effort to seize unredacted voter rolls, leaving the department to press state officials on a theory the record has not yet supported.
Fontes called the letter insulting and said Arizona election officials have always worked to ensure that only eligible citizens are registered to vote and will continue following Arizona law, not political rhetoric or intimidation. Henderson called the letter “truly bizarre behavior” from an agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights. The immediate question is not whether the letters arrived; they did. It is whether the department follows up with enforcement, or whether the five-day deadline becomes the first test of how far this new push can go.
