By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
April 25, 2025
The lawsuit Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales filed last week against the federal government for failing to verify the citizenship status of nearly 600,000 Hoosier voters comes as the two state officials are embroiled in two other disputes – which could possibly turn into litigation against the state – related to citizenship verification.
Rokita and Morales filed their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on April 16, seeking to push the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to confirm that the 585,774 individuals whose names were pulled from the Indiana voter registration rolls are U.S. citizens and, therefore, eligible to vote. The pair had sent the list of those individuals to the USCIS about three weeks before the November 2024 election and, at the time, said they wanted to ensure the integrity of the election process by “confirming that every person registered to vote in Indiana is a U.S. citizen.”
Now, Rokita and Morales said, they are taking legal action to compel the federal government to cooperate with their request. The two state officials said in their lawsuit that the Biden administration had not responded to multiple inquiries asking for help with citizenship verification, but, in announcing the lawsuit, Rokita seemed hopeful the Trump administration would provide the information they wanted.
“Following the Biden administration’s obstruction here, I expect that President Trump’s team will resolve this matter,” Rokita said in a press release. “This lawsuit is another important step in ensuring the integrity of our elections. Hoosiers have a right to know that legitimate ballots are not being diluted by noncitizens. I promised that I would get citizenship information from USCIS, and that is exactly what I am doing by filing this suit.”
Neither Rokita nor Morales in their announcement of the lawsuit or in the complaint, itself, pointed to any instances of noncitizens casting ballots at an Indiana polling place. Also, they did not offer any proof of noncitizens having registered to vote or cite any prosecutions of noncitizens voting in Indiana.
Ami Gandhi, director of the Midwest Voting Rights Program at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said the overwhelming evidence shows noncitizens do not vote or attempt to vote in Indiana’s elections.
“Contrary to the assertions the state makes in its lawsuit, each Indiana registered voter has already affirmed their citizenship under penalty of perjury when registering to vote,” Gandhi said. “All of that is required under both Indiana and federal law. Only citizens can vote in our elections and our elections are already secure.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the USCIS, an agency of DHS that oversees immigration, including naturalization, did not respond to a request for comment.
As Rokita and Morales continue to demand USCIS and DHS verify the citizenship of certain individuals, they are facing other fights related to citizenship and voting. One involves a request to make public the list of nearly 60,000 Indiana voters sent to USCIS, while the other is focused on a plan to verify citizenship by using records from the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
The two state officials are resisting attempts to give the public access to the list of voters sent to USCIS. the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, parent of The Indiana Citizen, filed an open records request under the Indiana Access to Public Records Act before the election and, in February, the Indiana public access counselor issued an advisory opinion, finding the list should be disclosed.
In mid-March, the attorney general’s office, on behalf of the secretary of state, sent a letter to the Citizen Education Foundation, saying the PAC’s opinion was a “weak effort to apply public access law to the records at issue” and “suffers from oversimplification.” Still, the state’s top lawyer offered The Citizen limited access to view the list in-person and take only handwritten notes of the 585,774 voters.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, representing The Citizen, responded in a letter on April 3 that the position of the attorney general’s office “is inconsistent with applicable law.” Citing to the same statute the attorney general’s office referenced, the Reporters Committee countered the law includes the right in the case of electronically stored data to manually transcribe as well as to copy the data onto any medium of electronic storage.
“My client would, at this point, be satisfied with the Secretary of State’s offer to disclose the names and addresses included in the records at issue,” Kristopher Cundiff of the Reporters Committee, wrote in the letter. “We take exception with the offer to only view the records and make handwritten notes because it does not comply with APRA.”
To date, the attorney general’s office has not replied.
As part of the other battle, Morales and the Indiana Election Division have received notice from voting rights advocacy groups that the state could face litigation if it follows through with a plan to use records from the BMV to identify noncitizens on the voter rolls. The groups contend the state would violate the National Voter Registration Act because the plan could force naturalized citizens to prove their citizenship in order to cast a ballot, while U.S.-born citizens would not have to face such a requirement.
In their letter, the organizations said the BMV Citizenship Crosscheck Provision would “erroneously flag only naturalized, and not U.S.-born, citizens,” because the drivers licensing bureau’s database is not an accurate and reliable record of current non-citizens in Indiana. The groups asserted in the letter that if the violations were not corrected by July 1, when the new citizenship provision is set to take effect, they are reserving the right to take legal action.
Neither Morales nor the election division have responded.
“We look forward to hearing from the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office and the Indiana Election Division about their plans to correct their violations of the National Voter Registration Act and Civil Rights Act,” Gandhi said, adding that the “measures purporting to protect the integrity of elections should be designed to address actual substantive concerns and must confirm with law protecting voters’ rights.”
The notice of the NVRA violation was sent in early April by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Indianapolis law firm Bowman & Vlink, on behalf of multiple nonpartisan civic organizations including, Common Cause Indiana, the League of Women Voters of Indiana, Hoosier Asian American Power and the NAACP Indiana State Conference.
In their lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, Rokita and Morales claim the agency has refused to fulfill its statutory obligation to provide citizenship information and are asking the federal court to issue a preliminary and permanent injunction to compel the DHS to “immediately and continuingly” provide the citizenship status of Indiana voters. Also, they want access to the Person Centric Query Service developed by USCIS, which the lawsuit describes as using a broader array of identification information so state officials can confirm citizenship status without having to use the “immigration identifiers” that state do not typically possess.
“There is no harm to anyone – governmental or private – by compelling disclosure of citizenship statuses to Plaintiffs pursuant to a federal statutory obligation; and ‘the public has a strong interest’ in seeing that the federal government follows the law,” the lawsuit said, quoting from the 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Alaska Association of Realtors v. Department of Health & Human Services.
Rokita and Morales noted in the lawsuit that Indiana has access to homeland security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. However, they said, that program is not useful for verifying citizenship because it does not allow the state to search by identifiers it typically has, such as name, date of birth and last four digits of a social security number.
Since USCIS did not respond to their requests, Rokita and Morales said in their lawsuit that they have not been able to verify the citizenship of “many individuals on Indiana’s voter rolls” and cannot respond to inquiries from local officials seeking to confirm that specific voters were citizens.
“As Indiana’s Chief Election Officer, ensuring the integrity of our elections is non-negotiable,” Morales said in a press release. “This legal action is a continuation of our efforts for Indiana to lead the way in election integrity. Since we never received a response from the Biden administration, we know that under President Trump’s leadership and based on his recent Executive Order, there’s a stronger commitment to the election process. Hoosiers deserve nothing less than full confidence in the security of their vote.”
The lawsuit is State of Indiana, et al. v. United States Department of Homeland Security, et al., 1:25-cv-00732.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
