Attorney General Todd Blanche says the Justice Department is examining election practices in multiple states and has hundreds of investigations involving alleged voting by ineligible people as the administration expands voter-roll enforcement weeks before the November midterms.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
The Justice Department is investigating election practices in multiple states and examining hundreds of cases involving people suspected of voting despite being legally ineligible, Attorney General Todd Blanche said as the Trump administration intensifies its election-integrity efforts less than two months before the midterms.
Blanche disclosed the broader investigations while defending the administration’s attempt to impose new requirements on mail ballots, a policy the Supreme Court declined Monday to allow to take effect before the Nov. 3 election.
The attorney general told CBS News that the federal government is looking at election practices in “multiple states” and indicated that the work involves agencies beyond the Justice Department. He did not publicly identify every state under investigation or describe the specific practices being examined in each jurisdiction.
The disclosure comes amid a much broader Justice Department effort to obtain complete state voter-registration files.
The department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking full voter rolls after officials in those jurisdictions declined to provide all of the information requested by the federal government. DOJ says the records are needed to enforce federal election laws and determine whether states are maintaining accurate voter-registration systems.
According to the Justice Department, the attorney general has authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to demand election records for inspection and analysis, while the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act establish federal requirements governing voter-list maintenance.
“Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said when DOJ announced one round of lawsuits.
Blanche said the government’s work extends beyond questions about whether voter rolls contain outdated or otherwise ineligible registrations.
“We have hundreds of open investigations into people who are here illegally and who potentially and, in many cases, they’ve been charged with voting,” Blanche said.
“So, we have hundreds of ongoing investigations where we have identified people who are here illegally or are otherwise not eligible to vote, that have voted,” he added. “We have some of them [who] have been charged. Some of those investigations are ongoing.”
Individual federal cases involving noncitizens accused or convicted of voting have been publicly announced, although many of the investigations referenced by Blanche have not been disclosed because they remain open.
DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security now operate a joint election-integrity initiative that lists federal enforcement actions involving alleged noncitizen voting and other election-related violations.
The administration also has explored sharing state voter-registration information with Homeland Security Investigations so federal officials can compare voter files against citizenship and immigration databases.
A May Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluded that federal law permits DOJ to compel production of statewide voter-registration lists and allows those records to be shared with DHS for investigations of potential voter fraud.
Asked whether the information being collected from states would be assembled into a federal database, Blanche said he was “not aware of a database” but made clear that the government intends to use the records rather than merely retain them.
“We’re not going to just do it and leave it in an office,” Blanche said. “We would use it to help us understand whether there’s people here voting who shouldn’t be voting.”
The expanding investigations were disclosed only hours after the Supreme Court left in place an injunction preventing the administration from implementing a separate set of mail-ballot requirements for this year’s midterms.
The Postal Service adopted those rules in August following a March executive order from President Donald Trump.
Under the regulation, states would have to provide USPS with information on people receiving mail ballots and use specially approved envelopes containing an election-mail logo, machine-readable design features and a unique barcode associated with each voter.
States would also upload voter information to a Postal Service portal.
Ballot mail failing to meet those requirements could be refused and returned to election officials for correction rather than delivered.
The administration argued that the system would strengthen election security and make it more difficult for ballots to reach ineligible voters.
Blanche defended that premise during his CBS interview.
Asked what evidence demonstrated that the new restrictions would prevent fraud, Blanche initially replied that there was “a lot of evidence” and argued that mail voting inherently presents more opportunity for fraud than voting in person with identification.
Pressed to identify the evidence supporting that comparison, Blanche answered, “Well, it’s common sense.”
Research cited by CBS paints a more limited picture of documented mail-ballot fraud.
A 2025 analysis examining the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections identified roughly four cases of mail-ballot fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast, an average rate of approximately 0.000043%.
A separate Stanford study involving about 4.5 million Washington state voters identified 14 ballots that might have been cast after a voter’s death — about 0.0003% — while noting that even those instances could have resulted from record-matching or clerical errors.
Those findings do not mean mail-ballot fraud never occurs. Federal and state authorities have prosecuted individual cases involving fraudulent absentee ballots, duplicate voting and ineligible voting.
The dispute instead centers on the scale of the problem and whether the administration’s proposed remedy is legally authorized and proportionate to documented risks.
The Supreme Court did not permanently decide that question Monday.
Instead, the justices refused to suspend a preliminary injunction preventing the Postal Service rules from taking effect during the midterms.
“The government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction,” the court said. “And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the restrictions should not take effect for this election but wrote separately that the Postal Service may ultimately possess the legal authority to establish such requirements.
His concern centered largely on timing.
Mail-ballot preparations were already well underway, and some states had begun distributing ballots by the time the case reached the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh concluded that forcing election officials to overhaul their systems at that stage would be improper even if the underlying Postal Service regulation might ultimately survive legal review.
Election officials challenging the rule said the technical changes would have been extraordinarily difficult to implement before November.
The litigation also raised constitutional questions about the division of election authority among states, Congress and the executive branch.
The Constitution gives state legislatures the initial authority to prescribe the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections while allowing Congress to alter those rules. Opponents argue that the president and Postal Service cannot effectively rewrite state mail-voting procedures without congressional authorization.
The administration maintains that it is regulating the handling of mail through the federal postal system rather than directly taking over state elections.
That dispute will continue even though the requirements are blocked for the 2026 midterms.
Meanwhile, the voter-roll litigation and investigations disclosed by Blanche remain active.
The Justice Department’s lawsuits have spread across states controlled by both parties, including California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Connecticut, Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, New Jersey and Idaho, among others.
DOJ says its goal is to obtain sufficiently complete data to identify registrations that may not comply with federal eligibility requirements.
Some states and voting-rights groups have objected to providing unredacted files containing sensitive personal information, raising privacy, data-security and federal-authority concerns.
The Justice Department has acknowledged in litigation that voter-roll information could be shared with DHS for citizenship checks, a use its Office of Legal Counsel says is permissible under federal law.
Blanche’s comments make clear that the administration views those records as an investigative resource rather than solely as a means of auditing state compliance.
The attorney general says federal authorities already have “hundreds” of investigations involving people believed to be unauthorized immigrants or otherwise ineligible voters and intend to use state data to identify additional cases.
At the same time, the administration’s most immediate attempt to impose nationwide changes on how mail ballots move through the postal system has been halted for November.
The result leaves two parallel election battles unfolding as voting approaches: one in federal courts over the extent of executive authority to change mail-ballot procedures, and another involving Justice Department investigations and demands for voter-registration data from states across the country.
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