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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has pulled back the curtain on a problem too many in Washington want to ignore: the Justice Department’s review has turned up what she describes as tens of thousands of noncitizens and hundreds of thousands of deceased or departed people still on state voter rolls. This isn’t idle chatter — these are the kinds of errors that sap confidence in our elections and give ammunition to those who say the system can’t be trusted.
The DOJ reports it has sifted through tens of millions of records in its effort to audit and help states clean their lists, a painstaking job that should have been routine but has been politicized at every turn. When the federal government offers to help identify duplicates, dead registrants, and noncitizen enrollments, the proper conservative instinct is to welcome accuracy and accountability, not reflexive obstruction.
Yet officials in some states and activist judges are throwing up procedural roadblocks while the clock ticks toward critical midterm contests, forcing the department to fight in court just to do what any responsible administrator would: verify who is eligible to vote. Dhillon’s frustration is the frustration of every taxpayer who expects government to safeguard the integrity of elections rather than hide behind privacy excuses and legal foot-dragging.
Honest critics will note that rigorous checks so far have only confirmed a relatively small number of actually cast illegitimate ballots — “dozens,” according to some reporting — but that misses the point. Even a handful of illegal votes undermines public trust and, more importantly, the presence of tens or hundreds of thousands of inaccurate entries is a systemic problem begging for repair, not for dismissal because the cure requires work.
Some state-level audits have produced reassuring figures — for example, a recent Georgia review flagged roughly 20 noncitizens out of millions of registered voters — and conservatives should celebrate strong systems where they exist. But those isolated successes don’t negate the nationwide picture Dhillon and the DOJ are describing; they underscore the unevenness of state list maintenance and the need for federal support to ensure uniform standards.
Hardworking Americans deserve election systems that are both accessible and secure. That means insisting on commonsense reforms: robust list maintenance, accurate cross-state matching, verification tools that respect privacy while removing clear errors, and swift prosecution where malicious actors try to subvert the process. Conservatives should lead on these reforms, demanding transparency and action from secretaries of state and from Congress until every voter can be confident their ballot counts and only eligible citizens participate.
Patriots don’t flinch from hard truths — we fix them. If the DOJ’s review exposed problems, then clean the rolls, strengthen penalties for fraud, and equip local officials to keep voter lists honest. Protecting the franchise means protecting its integrity, and defending that principle is the duty of every American who cares about free and fair elections.
