Allegations of potential noncitizen voting spark legal fights

Key points

• The Justice Department has sued California and 29 other states that refused to hand over full voter rolls.
• Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said she found 52 questionable voters among more than 2 million registrations.
• Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett said FBI agents seized more than 600 boxes of election records in January.

With midterm elections two weeks away, the Justice Department is in legal fights with states over voter information and has threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are likely noncitizens. Federal agents have seized ballots, and voting machines have been examined.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees her state's elections, told 60 Minutes she has never seen this kind of interference. She said earlier threats were external, but now some come from within the government.

States refuse voter roll demands

Last year the Justice Department asked nearly every state for full voter rolls, including confidential information such as Social Security numbers and full dates of birth. Henderson refused, saying she was not given good reasons for the request. Officials in 29 other states, both Democratic and Republican, also refused, and the department has sued all of them.

The administration says access to the rolls will help remove noncitizens who are not entitled to vote, and it has alleged without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber questioned the accuracy of the data and said the department's efforts "serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections." Henderson said she found just 52 questionable voters out of more than 2 million in Utah, and that she is under investigation.

In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI

— Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett

Seized ballots in Georgia

In January, armed federal agents seized ballots from a facility in Fulton County, Georgia, using a criminal search warrant that Georgia's secretary of state described as full of baseless claims. Agents packed up more than 600 boxes of election records from the 2020 election. Commissioner Dana Barrett said she does not know where the ballots are now and believes the seizure was political theater aimed at undermining future elections.

Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said the administration is looking at thousands of possible noncitizen voting cases and that more than 1,000 observers would be at the polls. She called concerns that Mr. Trump might challenge midterm results paranoia. Recent surveys show only about half of Americans expect the midterms to be free and fair.