Every Court Said No. The Voter Data Kept Moving.

In April, Judge David Carter of Los Angeles handed down the ruling that set the terms for the year.

The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data. — David Carter

He was just as blunt about where such a demand could come from.

It cannot be the product of an executive fiat. — David Carter

Carter was one voice in a chorus. Through the spring, federal courts handed the Justice Department six straight defeats in its suits demanding unredacted voter rolls — in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and Rhode Island — and by July eleven dismissals had piled up in all ^[1][2]. No court had said yes. The department kept appealing, pressing an accelerated Sixth Circuit appeal toward the Supreme Court and asking to stay a related California order ^[3][4]. The demand did not shrink. It had other doors — some open from the start. In December, months before the department sued the states that refused, Texas handed over its entire roll of 18.4 million voters — dates of birth, driver's license numbers, the last four digits of Social Security numbers ^[5]. It did not have to; the state simply agreed. Thirteen states in all have volunteered their lists or promised them ^[6], even as the department sued the ones that refused. There was also a door that needed no judge. An administrative subpoena is issued by an agency on its own authority, not by a court, and this spring Homeland Security used it to demand voter registration applications, signatures, and voting history from all 254 Texas counties ^[7]. Some requests named no voters at all. In Brazos County, the demand was so open-ended that even Republican state officials told counties to bring in counsel.

because the request is open-ended. — Trudy Hancock

A third door needed no proof, only a threat. In July, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote to all fifty states and the District of Columbia warning that any election official who kept a noncitizen on the rolls could face criminal charges, and demanding an answer within five days ^[2].

Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state's [state voter registration list] or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability. — Harmeet Dhillon

The fourth door opened this week. On October 28 the department issued more than a hundred subpoenas to state and local election officials across at least a dozen states — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Georgia, Texas, and Kansas among them — and at least 44 of those subpoenas were routed through grand juries ^[8]. A grand jury subpoena is issued in secret by the jurors themselves, not by a judge weighing the merits, and it compels documents on its face. Criminal process is the one channel where getting the papers requires no winning case — the very thing the civil courts had spent the year refusing to grant. A federal whistleblower alleged something further: an initiative in which citizenship-agency staff posed as individual voters to reach databases states had restricted, working under quotas of forty people per shift ^[9]. And Michigan officials alleged, as the Sixth Circuit weighed their case, that the true aim was a national voter file built with Homeland Security to identify noncitizens — a purpose no single lawsuit would display ^[6]. Both remain allegations. The year's record, measured in the government's own terms, is thin. In January, a federal review ran roughly 49.5 million voter registrations through Homeland Security's own verification tool and found no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting: about 10,000 cases — 0.02 percent — were referred for inspection, and being flagged means only being flagged, not that anyone cast a ballot ^[10]. The platform the White House pressed agencies to use was deployed, ProPublica reported, despite internal warnings that it would produce an 'ungodly' number of false positives ^[11]. Homeland Security publicly claimed 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's rolls. Its own records confirmed 185 ^[12]. Nevada's secretary of state watched seven subpoenas arrive at his office in three months.

The federal administration is inundating election offices with investigations and questions ahead of the election, and making sweeping claims of election fraud to the public before any investigation is done. — Francisco Aguilar

Add up the year and roughly 90 people have been charged nationwide with noncitizen voting ^[13]. The flagship — the case the department held up — was the Minnesota grand jury indictment charging 10 foreign nationals whose alleged illegal votes totaled seven ballots in 2024, about 0.0002 percent of the state's total ^[13]. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says his agency is investigating more than 1,600 voter fraud cases, with hundreds of thousands more it has not yet reached ^[13]. The cases are real, some of them. In October, federal agents arrested 10 foreign nationals in North Carolina, some accused of voting in as many as eight elections over two decades ^[14]. A paid circulator in Los Angeles pleaded guilty to a federal felony for buying registration data from Skid Row residents ^[15]. A Cheverly, Maryland review of 98 noncitizens found roughly a quarter appear to have voted ^[8]. The record is not invented. It is inflated. Then there is Marva Cook, a green-card holder in Syracuse who says she believed she was an American citizen until she found a German birth certificate. She faces a misdemeanor, a fine up to $100,000, and deportation ^[14]. A federal prosecutor read her case differently.

voter fraud is rampant — John A. Sarcone III

The instruments themselves carry their own timing. The department's record 1,000 election monitors — criminal prosecutors among them — were given a mandate that sets their review for after the voting is done ^[16].

Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate — United States Department of Justice

In Alaska, the department pre-filed a lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Senate race if Republican Dan Sullivan loses, on the theory that a same-named candidate on the ranked-choice ballot confuses voters — a suit ordered, by the accounts given, by the president himself ^[17]. Days before the election it asked a court to set aside roughly 20,000 California mail-in ballots it says are tied to noncitizens ^[17]. All the while, the operation's stated purpose was to restore the public's trust in elections. The one measured output runs the other way: likely-voter confidence that votes will be counted accurately has fallen from 55 percent in July to 46 percent in October ^[18]. On one side of the ledger sit ninety charges. On the other, 300,000 claimed cases queued behind them, waiting to be gotten to ^[13] — a file still growing, sized for something larger than any single indictment.