Asst. AG Harmeet Dhillon: 30 States Resisting DOJ Review Of Voter Rolls That Found 400,000 Dead People Registered | Video

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told the RCP podcast on Thursday about the Justice Department’s plan to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors around the country during the 2026 midterm elections, and a longer-term effort to clean up voter rolls and election integrity regulations around the country.

She argues the expanded effort is intended to improve public confidence, monitor compliance with federal election laws, and identify irregularities, in a situation where a review of state voter rolls has already discovered nearly 400,000 dead people and 30,000 non-citizens registered to vote.

“And that’s just in my review of the one-third of states that voluntarily complied with DOJ’s request to review the voter rolls,” she said. “This is not a trivial problem when you see elections being won by one vote sometimes in our country, dozens of votes.”

About 30 states aren’t complying with the DOJ’s request to review their voter rolls. “We’re in litigation with them,” Dhillon said. “Eventually, I believe this is probably going to reach the United States Supreme Court because I think it is very clear under the 1960 Civil Rights Act that the attorney general or his designee—that would be me—has the legal right to request the voter rolls for purposes of auditing compliance with our federal statutes, and states are simply refusing to give them.”

“Judges are making up reasons that don’t exist in statute or in case law.”

“What we’re finding here is that this is a problem,” she said. “The way the federal government could tackle this is to tie federal funding to some of these statutes that help with election administration, and certain basic minimum standards of running your election. Like this is a first-world country and not a third-world country. We do this in highway funding. We do this in a number of different areas.”

“Ultimately, there will be variations in the states. That’s part of our republican system. But there are certain practices, some arcane practices like Minnesota’s vouching law that allows a random person, including, you know, comically in an incident a few weeks ago with people dressed in burqas with their faces not showing, purporting to vouch for others.”

“I think voter ID is a critical measure,” Dhillon said. “We have federal criminal statutes on the books that for decades have almost never been enforced by the Department of Justice.”