DOJ Sends 29 States and DC Election-Record Preservation Letters Warning of Criminal Sanctions

The Justice Department sent letters on or about September 10, 2026 to 29 states and the District of Columbia directing election officials to preserve records from the 2024 election, roughly eight weeks before the November 3 midterms. Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Civil Rights Division, said the letters were to ensure states do not destroy records related to the pending lawsuits seeking their voter-registration databases — files containing addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

The operative sentence is the warning. The letters state that a failure to preserve relevant data “may constitute spoliation of evidence,” which could subject officials to “civil and criminal sanctions.”

That is the part worth recording, because of what surrounds it. This timeline has tracked the underlying litigation campaign from demand letters to 44 states in May 2025 through its expansion to 24 states and DC by January 2026, and then through a sustained losing streak: Maryland dismissed 0-9 by a Trump appointee in June, the Sixth Circuit handing DOJ its first appellate loss on Michigan in June, Colorado dismissed with prejudice and DC dismissed in August, Minnesota dismissed in August as a “fishing expedition.” By early August a tracker recorded five suits dismissed with twelve states having complied.

So the preservation letters arrive at a moment when the courts have been ruling against the demands, and they are addressed not to the states as litigants but to individual election officials, carrying a reference to criminal exposure. A preservation notice in live litigation is ordinary and lawful; that is exactly what makes this worth noting rather than alleging. The letter does what a preservation notice does, and it also places the phrase “criminal sanctions” in front of the people who administer the election, at the point where the litigation to compel them has been failing and the election is eight weeks out. Function, not stated intent, is the measure: whatever the purpose, the effect is a federal criminal-liability warning delivered to state election administrators during the pre-election window.

Set beside the parallel acquisition track — ICE/HSI’s September pre-solicitation for recurring nationwide voter-file acquisition through a private contractor, which requires no state’s cooperation at all — the pattern is two routes to the same data, one through the states and one around them.

Sourcing note. The letter count (29 states plus DC), the spoliation and “civil and criminal sanctions” language, the data fields at issue, and Dhillon’s attribution are confirmed across AP-syndicated and Washington Times reporting. The capture ledger characterized the campaign as reaching “more than 30 states” with DOJ having “lost 11 district court cases and its first appellate ruling”; the 29-plus-DC figure is what the sourcing supports for the preservation letters, and the 11-loss tally has not been independently verified here — canon documents several specific dismissals but no running total, and per corpus discipline an aggregate should be recomputed from a primary list rather than inherited. The Brennan Center tracker is the right source for a current count.