Alaska signed confidential DOJ agreement enabling federal flagging of individual voters for removal

On December 19, 2025, Alaska turned over a copy of its statewide voter rolls to the U.S. Department of Justice and, alongside that transfer, Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher signed a "confidential memorandum of understanding" with U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of DOJ's Civil Rights Division. The agreement states that the Justice Department "will securely notify you or your state of any voter list maintenance issues," and that within 45 days of such notice, the state "will clean its (list) by removing ineligible voters and resubmit the updated (list)" to DOJ's Civil Rights Division to confirm compliance with federal law.

Alaska officials, including Beecher and Kelly Howell, chief of staff to Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, said the agreement does not let DOJ directly purge voters: any voters DOJ flags would first be placed on Alaska's inactive list, which requires ID verification to vote and starts a four-year path to removal under state and federal law. The agreement states it was "entered into at your state's request," but Dahlstrom's office disputed that characterization, saying DOJ provided the agreement and that it was entered pursuant to a state law allowing the Division of Elections to share voters' confidential information with a federal agency for authorized governmental purposes only -- a clause Dahlstrom's office said DOJ could violate if it sought faster removals than the agreement's own terms permit.

Alaska is one of at least a dozen states that have signed materially identical agreements, per federal court testimony in a related case, with the text closely mirroring one previously disclosed in DOJ's separate lawsuit against Colorado, which refused to comply. Former state Sen. Tom Begich called the deal a threat to Alaska's "constitutional right to run our own elections" and called on the state legislature to investigate.

Updates

2026-04-21 — ACLU sued Alaska Division of Elections over DOJ voter-roll sharing [3, 4]

The League of Women Voters of Alaska and the Alaska Black Caucus, represented by the ACLU, sued Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and Carol Beecher in Anchorage Superior Court, alleging the voter-roll sharing and DOJ memorandum of understanding violated Alaska's constitutional privacy and due-process protections. The suit sought to void the agreement and compel DOJ to destroy the voter rolls Alaska had shared.