DOJ threatens state election officials with criminal penalties over noncitizen voting

The Trump administration is using the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to threaten state and local election officials with criminal prosecution over the already-illegal act of noncitizen voting. In July 2025, the head of the division, Harmeet Dhillon, sent letters to election officials in a growing list of states—including Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—warning that they could face criminal penalties for failing to carry out their duties to prevent noncitizens from voting. This threat comes just months before the 2026 midterm elections and is the latest in a coordinated federal campaign to tighten control over state election administration. While noncitizen voting is already a federal crime punishable by fines, imprisonment, and deportation—and every state already requires voters to affirm citizenship under penalty of perjury—this letter weaponizes the threat of prosecution against officials who administer elections, not against individual voters who might commit fraud. The letters are legally dubious: election officials are not typically individually criminally liable for isolated instances of noncitizen registration or voting that occur despite standard procedures. In fact, studies and court records show that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare—the Brennan Center found a rate of 0.0001% in 2016. This is not about election integrity. It is about creating a chilling effect that pressures officials to purge voter rolls aggressively, potentially disenfranchising eligible citizens, and to resist any expansions of voting access (like same-day registration, mail voting, or automatic registration) that are framed as enabling noncitizen participation. The DOJ's letter is a tool to intimidate election administrators into adopting restrictive policies, and to provide cover for the administration to claim that any election outcome they dislike must be due to noncitizen fraud.