DOJ wants to help anti-voting group purge California rolls

By Natalie Hausmann

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon emerges from her office for a photoshoot in a Civil Rights Division conference room at Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. on April 1, 2026. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

The Department of Justice wants to intervene in a lawsuit to force a massive voter roll purge in California.

Tom Fitton, the president of the far-right legal group Judicial Watch, boasted on social media Wednesday that the DOJ seeks to “clean nearly 1 million dirty voter names from California’s voter rolls” after the department filed its motion to intervene as a plaintiff Monday.

Judicial Watch has led the charge in seeking to purge voter rolls in Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky and New York.

The motion comes nearly two months after Judicial Watch filed its initial complaint, arguing the state has not made a “reasonable effort” to purge the names of voters who have moved out of state, in accordance with Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). 

Fitton’s post today is pinned alongside a May 21 post claiming there are 873,092 inactive voters registered in the state. This is the number listed in Judicial Watch’s complaint. Fitton did not account for the 126,928 registration discrepancy in his two coinciding posts.

In addition to the NVRA claim, Monday’s DOJ complaint also brought a claim under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which can only be brought by the department. 

“Secretary Weber has failed to take necessary actions for the State of California to meet the requirements of Section 303 of HAVA,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in the complaint. “These failures include, but are not limited to, Secretary Weber’s failure to maintain a statewide voter registration list.”

The push for the purge is happening against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s crusade to seize statewide voter rolls and create a federal voter database. 

Trump’s DOJ has lost 15 separate challenges to access state voter rolls.

Dhillon gave a deadline of Aug. 5 for California to enact “systematic voter removal,” citing the NVRA, and chimed in on social media in response to Fitton’s post that she is “fighting daily to improve quality and confidence in our elections.”

A hearing Aug. 10 will determine whether the DOJ can intervene.