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Michigan is among states doubling down on rejecting Trump administration investigations and oversight into elections, claiming protection of the right to vote, potentially setting up a battle that could escalate to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Justice Department is demanding roughly 865,000 ballots and hundreds of thousands of related election records from the Detroit area’s 2024 election, threatening to seek a court order if the materials are not turned over within 14 days.
In an April 14 letter to Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon asked for “all ballots (including absentee and provisional), ballot receipts, and ballot envelopes” from the November 2024 federal election, saying the department was acting under federal records-retention law and investigating whether election laws were followed.
Dhillon wrote that the request was based on a “history of fraud convictions and other allegations” in Wayne County and warned that failure to comply “may result in the United States seeking a court order for production of such records.”
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“Here @theJusticeDept, ensuring election integrity is a paramount duty,” Dhillon wrote Sunday on X, sharing the video of her appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo. “Many states fail to clean noncitizen & deceased people from their voter rolls, and under my leadership, @CivilRights will continue working to ensure that ONLY eligible American citizens vote in our elections!”
Dhillon added her investigations seek to “ensure accountability for the outrageous weaponization of the deep state against President Trump and his team.”
“It must never be repeated!” she concluded.
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The demand marks the latest step in a broader push by the Trump administration to scrutinize election procedures in key swing states after earlier moves involving 2020 ballots in Georgia and election records in Arizona.
Democrat officials in Michigan blasted the request as baseless and politically motivated.
“If this administration wants to bring this circus to our state, my office is prepared to protect the people’s right to vote,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told The Washington Post.
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The Justice Department’s request covers ballots, ballot envelopes and ballot receipts in Wayne County, which includes Detroit.
Nessel wrote in a separate letter that the department is seeking about 865,000 ballots and that the request was directed to the wrong office because the ballots are held by 43 municipal clerks, not the Wayne County clerk.
In her letter, Dhillon cited three voter-fraud cases and repeated allegations raised in a 2020 lawsuit against Detroit and Wayne County over absentee-ballot handling. That suit was later dismissed, with a judge finding the allegations were not credible.
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Nessel argued that Dhillon’s request is a “fishing expedition” that goes too far back in state election history, and the past findings of fraud in 2020 were not widespread, claiming the “the process worked” in rooting out fraud.
Further investigation will be “an unwarranted intrusion into Michigan elections,” she added, and would put an undue burden on elections officials before the Aug. 2 primary, which more than three months away.
“Any form of federal interference in Michigan’s elections, including any attempt to seize election records, will be closely scrutinized,” she warned.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called the request a “poorly disguised attempt to justify more doubt and misinformation about our elections,” while Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson described it as the administration’s “latest attempt to interfere in our elections,” according to the Post.
The Post report of Michigan’s letter to Dhillon came hours after her appearance on Fox News, where Dhillon laid out the work of the DOJ and the obstruction it faces from Democrat-run states like Michigan.
“I’ve requested the voter rolls from all states and the District of Columbia,” Dhillon told Bartiromo. “About a third of the states have voluntarily complied with us or reached settlements with us, and we’ve run some of those records.
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“I’m suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for their refusal to give us the voter rolls to which the attorney general or the acting attorney general is entitled under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. We’re doing that to make sure that states are in compliance,” she said. “And guess what? States are not in compliance, even those ones who want to do so.”
Dhillon noted that in the DOJ’s investigation into the states that have cooperated with transparency to her requests, “we found at least 350,000 dead people currently on the voter rolls in those jurisdictions.”
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“And we’ve referred approximately 25,000 people with no citizenship records to Homeland Security to look at, you know, dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted,” she continued. “I’m in touch with voting rights activists who are showing me information about people who have voted, who are not American citizens.”
“So the left told us, this never happens. And it’s a myth,” Dhillon continued. “It definitely happened just recently, someone was indicted in Minnesota, of all places, for voting without being a citizen.”
Minnesota, Dhillon noted, “has a weird vouching law that allows citizens to vouch for each other’s citizenship.”
“That’s crazy and inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act, and we’re not going to rest until we complete this project,” Dhillon said.
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