DOJ Tells About 30 States to Keep Every 2024 Election Record After Retention Window Closed

The Justice Department sent letters to at least 30 chief election officials last week instructing them not to destroy 2024 federal-election records after the 22-month retention period in the Civil Rights Act of 1960 expired Sept. 5. The letters, dated Sept. 4, state that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are parties to “ongoing litigation.” Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels confirmed the notices went to “the states we are in active litigation against regarding their failure to provide the full” statewide registered-voter list. She did not answer questions about unspecified criminal investigations. Officials in Maine and Georgia told reporters they had not received a letter as of Wednesday.

Title III of the 1960 Act, codified at 52 U.S.C. § 20701, requires election officers to keep “all records and papers” relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting in a federal election for 22 months and, on a written demand stating basis and purpose, to make them available to the attorney general for inspection and copying. Willful destruction or concealment of those records is a separate federal offense. The department’s letters also demand electronic materials tied to the 2024 election, including computer logs and network-access data. A Friday letter to Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar from Eric Neff, acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, said the files must be kept because of the pending suit over unredacted voter lists that include driver’s-license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Aguilar’s office said Nevada would comply because of the litigation.

The letters sit on top of a year-long campaign that began after President Trump’s March 2025 executive order directing the attorney general to enforce voter-registration and list-maintenance statutes. The department requested complete statewide rolls from nearly every state, citing the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the 1960 Act. About a third of states produced lists or reached settlements, including Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas, Montana, and Oklahoma after it was sued. The department has filed about 31 lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia. Defendants include Democratic-run states and Republican-led Kentucky, Idaho, West Virginia, Utah, and Georgia. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has said the lists are needed to check whether states remove the dead, movers, and people with disqualifying convictions and to protect citizens from vote dilution. In cooperating jurisdictions she has said the department found hundreds of thousands of deceased registrants still on the rolls. In July she sent separate letters to all 50 states warning of possible prosecution if officials knowingly allow noncitizens to vote.

No court has ruled for the department on the merits. Trackers compiled by the University of Wisconsin Law School and the Bipartisan American Election Project show 23 district-court dismissals, one Georgia filing tossed for the wrong venue and refiled, and the Oklahoma case dropped after a production agreement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in June affirmed the Michigan dismissal, 2–1, holding that a statewide computerized voter file created by the state is not a “record or paper” that “come[s] into” an election officer’s possession under the 1960 Act and that NVRA and HAVA do not independently compel the unredacted dump the department sought. Several district judges, including Trump appointees in Maryland and New Hampshire, reached the same conclusion on the Civil Rights Act claim and said some demand letters failed to state a factual basis and purpose. Nearly all dismissals are on appeal. The Ninth Circuit has stayed some appeals pending California and Oregon. No circuit has yet sided with the department.

States that refused have argued the requests exceed federal power, expose driver’s-license and Social Security data, and were not tied to a concrete discrimination investigation of the kind Congress contemplated in 1960. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel has taken the opposite view: that statewide lists fall inside Section 20701 and may be shared with Homeland Security for eligibility checks. That memo has been cited and rejected in at least one dismissal. Destroying 2024 paper and electronic files after Sept. 5 would, if a court later agrees with the department, risk a records-retention charge even if the underlying list suits fail. If the appeals fail, the letters still freeze destruction while the cases remain open. Midterm ballots are already in the mail in some states. The department has not published a full list of letter recipients or named the criminal statutes under review beyond the civil docket already in court.