DOJ seeks Wayne County ballots, Michigan officials call demand baseless

The Justice Department has demanded access to Wayne County’s 2024 election records, including all ballots, absentee and provisional, plus ballot receipts and ballot envelopes, in a move Michigan officials say rests on baseless and recycled fraud claims.

In a letter dated April 14, 2026, Harmeet K. Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division asked Wayne County Clerk Cathy M. Garrett in Detroit to preserve and produce records from the November 2024 federal election. The letter invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and said election records must be kept for 22 months after a federal election, framing the request as an election-law compliance review rather than a search for wrongdoing.

The department’s letter also leaned on prior Wayne County fraud cases, citing convictions involving Nancy Juanita Williams, Carless Clark and John Paul Parana. It further referenced allegations tied to the 2020 Detroit and Wayne County election litigation, claims that a court later described as incorrect and not credible. That history is at the center of the dispute: Michigan officials say the department is trying to revive disproven allegations from 2020 and use them to justify access to sensitive election records.

State leaders have already fought a separate federal case this year over election data. In February, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said a federal judge dismissed the department’s lawsuit seeking Michigan’s unredacted statewide electronic voter list. Judge Hala Jarbou of the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan ruled that the department’s arguments under the Civil Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act did not justify disclosure of the statewide voter list. Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said the ruling showed the Trump administration was overreaching and trying to pressure election officials into handing over private voter data.

The new Wayne County demand has intensified those concerns. States United Democracy Center said the letter relies on already-disproven claims from the 2020 election and echoes debunked conspiracy theories. Michigan election officials continue to say the state’s voting system is secure, that its procedures have already been reviewed and found accurate, and that the federal request lacks a legitimate basis for prying into local records.

The fight now turns on how far federal election oversight can go before it becomes something else entirely: a challenge to state control over election administration, one that could further erode trust in ballots already counted and certified.