DOJ demands Wayne County, Michigan turn over all ~865,000 ballots from the 2024 election

On April 14, 2026, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent a demand letter to Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett directing her to turn over every ballot, ballot receipt, and ballot envelope — including absentee and provisional ballots — cast in Michigan's most populous county in the November 2024 federal election. By the county's own reporting, that is on the order of 865,000 ballots from a single election. Dhillon framed the demand as an inspection authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The letter's predicates were all drawn from the 2020 election: a civil suit (Costantino v. Detroit) that a Wayne County judge had dismissed, and three individual voter-fraud convictions out of more than 800,000 ballots cast that year. The letter offered no 2024-specific predicate, gave the clerk 14 days to comply, and warned that the Justice Department would seek a court order if Wayne County refused.

Michigan's senior elected officials — Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel — rejected the demand in a joint response. Nessel and Benson sent a formal reply on April 17, 2026, characterizing the demand as weaponization of the Justice Department premised on rejected claims and stale allegations unconnected to the November 2024 election in Wayne County. Whitmer said Michigan's elections are safe and secure and that any attempt to suggest otherwise was an attempt to take away the constitutional right to vote. Nessel publicly described the request as "absurd" and "baseless." No state official agreed to turn over the ballots, and as of this writing the Justice Department had not filed in court.

The Wayne County demand sits in an explicit pattern. Within roughly the same window, the Civil Rights Division under Dhillon also sought 2024 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia (via an FBI raid that seized thousands of ballots) and Maricopa County, Arizona (via an FBI subpoena) — three of the most prominent 2024 jurisdictions in which Donald Trump either lost decisively or contested the result. The Standing records the Wayne County demand at the intersection of three abuses: the Justice Department's civil rights authorities being deployed asymmetrically against a county that voted against the administration (weaponizing-doj), a federal investigation opened on a stale and previously-dismissed predicate with no 2024 basis (politicized-investigations), and a federal civil-rights statute repurposed to obtain state election records absent any specific 2024 predicate (executive-overreach). A separate DOJ effort to obtain Michigan's statewide voter rolls had already been dismissed by a Trump-appointed federal judge in February 2026 — a notable adverse procedural backdrop for the new demand.