America First Legal pried loose election records from the Minnesota Secretary of State that reveal nearly 18,900 voters registered or updated their registrations on Election Day in 2024 by having someone else vouch for their residency, sidestepping the standard identification requirements that most states treat as a baseline safeguard.
The figures, broken down across three election cycles, show the practice is not a rare backstop. It is a routine feature of how Minnesota runs its elections. And the state agency that oversees those elections says it does not even track which method of vouching was used.
That gap between the scale of the practice and the state's willingness to document it sits at the center of a growing fight over whether Minnesota's same-day registration rules comply with federal law, a fight that now involves the U.S. Department of Justice.
The data, obtained by America First Legal through a public records request and reported by Just the News, covers the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections. The pattern is consistent: vouching is heavily used in presidential years and drops in midterms, but never disappears.
In 2024, almost 18,900 Election Day registrations involved vouching. Of those, 13,441 were updates to existing voter registrations. Another 5,457 were brand-new registrations, people who showed up at the polls, had someone vouch for where they lived, and cast a ballot the same day.
The 2020 cycle showed a similar volume: 17,616 vouched-for registrations or updates, including 5,069 new registrations. The 2022 midterms saw a dip to 10,278 total, with 2,215 new registrations.
Put another way, more than 12,700 people registered to vote for the first time across those three cycles using a system that requires no photo ID, no utility bill, and no government-issued proof of address, just an oath from a fellow registered voter or a residential facility employee.
Under Minnesota law, a registered voter from the same precinct can accompany someone to the polls and sign an oath confirming that person's address. A single voucher can attest for up to eight voters. Employees of certain residential facilities, nursing homes, group homes, and similar institutions, can do the same for their residents.
The person being vouched for must still present some form of identity document. But as the New York Post has reported, the acceptable IDs include items that do not prove citizenship: expired identification cards, school IDs, military IDs, and even foreign passports. Critics note that Minnesota's 2023 "Driver's Licenses for All" law, which grants licenses regardless of immigration status and without citizenship markings, compounds the concern. A noncitizen could, in theory, present a valid Minnesota driver's license and have a registered voter sign an oath, and the state would have no mechanism to flag the registration as potentially improper.
That vulnerability is not hypothetical hand-wringing. It is exactly what federal officials have begun to investigate.
The Trump Justice Department sent Minnesota officials a formal demand for records related to the vouching system. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, in a letter to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, requested unredacted records from the March 2024 primary and the November 2024 general election covering same-day registration and voting.
Dhillon did not mince words about why.
"The Department of Justice is particularly concerned with votes and registrations accepted on the basis of 'vouching' from other registered voters or residential facility employees, as well as other same-day registration procedures."
The DOJ said the purpose of the demand was to determine whether Minnesota's practices comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the federal law that set minimum identification and registration standards after the chaos of the 2000 presidential election.
Dhillon put it bluntly, as the Washington Examiner reported: "This system seems facially inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. We'll see!"
Minnesota officials have maintained that vouching transactions are logged and supported by sworn affidavits. But the records AFL obtained tell a different story about the state's appetite for transparency.
When America First Legal sought more detailed information, specifically, data on which vouching method was used in each transaction, the Secretary of State's office responded that it "does not record or maintain data on vouching method." In several other categories, the office said there was "no data responsive" to the request.
Think about that for a moment. Minnesota allows one person to vouch for up to eight others. It permits residential facility employees to do the same for their residents. Nearly 19,000 registrations relied on this process in a single election. And the state cannot, or will not, say how many involved a neighbor versus a nursing home staffer, or whether any single voucher hit the eight-person cap.
AFL attorney Will Scolinos framed the gap as a deliberate choice, not an administrative oversight.
"The Minnesota Secretary of State disregards America's fundamental need for secure, transparent elections. Americans have the right to know that every vote cast is legal and every election is secure."
The criticism lands harder when you consider that Minnesota is not some small-turnout state where a few thousand registrations are a rounding error. It routinely posts among the highest voter-participation rates in the country. In tight races, a few thousand unverified registrations can matter enormously, and recent special elections have shown just how narrow margins can be.
The vouching controversy does not exist in a vacuum. Minnesota has faced a series of questions about oversight failures in recent years, most notably the massive daycare fraud scandal that funneled hundreds of millions in federal dollars to sham operations.
In that case, state leaders were slow to acknowledge the problem and quick to claim credit once federal investigators moved in. The pattern, a permissive system, minimal state-level auditing, and belated responses only after outside pressure, echoes in the election-integrity debate now unfolding.
Minnesota's political establishment has long defended same-day registration and vouching as tools of democratic access. Supporters argue the system works because vouchers sign sworn affidavits and face penalties for lying. But sworn affidavits are only as strong as the enforcement behind them. And there is no indication in the records AFL obtained that the state has ever systematically audited vouching transactions for accuracy, let alone prosecuted a voucher for a false oath.
The broader political landscape in the state adds another layer. Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has dominated statewide offices for years, and Republicans have struggled to break through against entrenched institutional advantages. Whether the vouching system contributes to that dynamic is a question the data alone cannot answer. But the refusal to collect the data that might answer it speaks volumes.
The Help America Vote Act requires states to obtain and verify certain identification information from voters who register by mail without providing a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. The question the DOJ is now pressing is whether Minnesota's vouching system effectively creates an end-run around those requirements for in-person, same-day registrants.
Minnesota officials say their system is lawful and that vouching has been part of the state's election framework for decades. That may be true as a matter of state law. But federal preemption questions do not resolve themselves by pointing to tradition.
The DOJ's demand for unredacted records, not just aggregate numbers, but the actual registration files, suggests the investigation is not a courtesy inquiry. Dhillon's characterization of the system as "facially inconsistent" with HAVA is the kind of language that precedes enforcement action, not a polite request for clarification.
Meanwhile, the national electoral map continues to tighten, and the integrity of voter rolls in competitive states has become one of the defining fights of the current political cycle. Minnesota, with its combination of same-day registration, permissive ID rules, and a vouching system that processes thousands of registrations with minimal documentation, sits squarely at the center of that fight.
No one has proven that Minnesota's vouching system produced fraudulent votes. That is an important caveat, and it should be stated plainly. But the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, especially when the state itself admits it does not collect the data that would allow anyone to check.
Nearly 47,000 Election Day registrations or updates across three cycles relied on someone else's word instead of standard identification. The state cannot say who vouched for whom, how many times individual vouchers were used, or whether the system was exploited. It simply does not keep those records.
That is not a system designed for transparency. It is a system designed to avoid scrutiny. And now, for the first time, the federal government is asking the questions that Minnesota's own officials never bothered to ask.
When a state makes it easy to vote but hard to verify, the people who pay the price are the millions of lawful voters whose ballots deserve to count exactly once, and never be canceled out by one that shouldn't have been cast at all.
