Alaska Sent 3,048 Voters a Letter Asking Them to Prove They’re Citizens. Now It’s Being Sued Over How It Got Their Data.
Ahead of Alaska’s August 18, 2026 primary, the state’s Division of Elections mailed letters to 3,048 registered voters asking them to verify their U.S. citizenship. The number is far larger than usual: a routine quarterly comparison between DMV records and the statewide voter file normally turns up about 200 names for review. This cycle it turned up more than fifteen times that.
Elections Director Carol Beecher (R) told a joint legislative hearing on July 22 that “a lot of old data was picked up somehow,” attributing much of the spike to stale DMV records rather than newly discovered noncitizen registrations. She said the letters do not strip anyone of the right to vote.
The letters are only one strand of a larger story. In December 2025, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R), who oversees the Division of Elections, authorized sending Alaska’s complete, unredacted voter file to the Trump Justice Department. In April, civil-liberties groups sued her over it — a case still pending as of this writing.
- 3,048 — citizenship-verification letters sent to registered Alaska voters, down from an initial estimate of “about 3,500,” per Division spokesman Steve Kirch
- ~200 — names this quarterly DMV-to-voter-roll comparison normally turns up — this cycle's total ran more than 15 times that
- 593,208 — total registered Alaska voters as of April 2026 — the letters reached roughly one out of every 195 of them
- Dec. 23, 2025 — the date Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) authorized transmitting Alaska's unredacted voter file to the DOJ, the transfer now being challenged in court
Every quarter, Alaska’s Division of Elections runs a routine comparison between Department of Motor Vehicles records and the statewide voter file, looking for mismatches that might indicate a registered voter is not a U.S. citizen. In an ordinary cycle, that comparison flags around 200 names. This time, it flagged thousands.
Wire reports on the mailing, including the Associated Press account carried by the Washington Times, initially put the number at roughly 3,500. Division spokesman Steve Kirch later gave a precise, corrected figure: 3,048 letters, sent to registered voters across the state and asking each recipient to confirm their citizenship status or risk removal from the rolls ahead of Alaska’s August 18, 2026 primary. Against 593,208 total registered voters as of April 2026, that is roughly one out of every 195 names on the rolls.
Part of what made this cycle unusual traces back to a separate, nonroutine data pull two months before the letters went out. In March 2026, the state DMV sent the Division of Elections roughly 15,200 driver’s license and ID applicant records flagged with citizenship-status information — a far larger and more targeted batch than the DMV data the Division normally checks against the voter file each quarter. Cross-referencing that larger batch against the rolls is what produced the outsized total, officials say, rather than any single new wave of noncitizens registering to vote.
The spike drew Elections Director Carol Beecher (R) before a joint hearing of the Alaska House Judiciary and State Affairs committees on July 22, 2026. Beecher, a registered Republican appointed to the post by Lt. Gov. Dahlstrom and a past donor to both Dahlstrom and Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R), told lawmakers the unusual volume traced back to the condition of the underlying records rather than a wave of newly discovered noncitizen registrations.
“A lot of old data was picked up somehow.”
Carol Beecher (R) · Alaska Elections Director, July 22, 2026 committee hearing
Beecher also pushed back on the idea that the mailing amounts to a purge. “It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote,” she told the committees, noting that a letter is a request for confirmation, not an automatic cancellation.
Not every lawmaker was reassured. House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Andrew Gray (D-Anchorage) said constituents who had contacted his office about the letters “are U.S. citizens,” raising the concern that the DMV-data match is generating false positives — citizens being asked to prove a status they already hold. Others on the committee defended the review as ordinary list maintenance. Rep. Kevin McCabe (R-Big Lake) told the hearing that catching bad data is simply part of the Division’s job: “This is actually their job… make sure the voter rolls are clean and correct.”
The citizenship letters sit inside a longer-running story about who has access to Alaska’s voter data. On December 23, 2025, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) authorized transmitting Alaska’s complete, unredacted voter registration list — names, dates of birth, home addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers — to the U.S. Department of Justice under a memorandum of understanding. Both the Division of Elections and Dahlstrom’s own office announced the transfer publicly, citing Alaska Statute 15.07.195(c)(1), which permits the state to share otherwise-confidential voter data with federal agencies for authorized purposes.
Alaska is not unusual in complying with a DOJ request of this kind. A Brennan Center for Justice tracker of Justice Department voter-file requests lists Alaska among roughly sixteen states that turned over data voluntarily, rather than among the states DOJ had to sue in order to get it. What set Alaska’s transfer apart, according to the civil-liberties groups that later sued, was that it went out unredacted — full driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers included — rather than in the stripped-down form other states have used to comply with similar requests.
On April 22, 2026, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, the ACLU of Alaska, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued Dahlstrom and the Division of Elections in Anchorage Superior Court — League of Women Voters of Alaska, et al. v. Dahlstrom, et al., Case No. 3AN-26-06319CI. The plaintiffs are the League of Women Voters of Alaska, the Alaska Black Caucus, and the Alaska Public Interest Research Group.
The complaint alleges the December transfer violated Alaska’s state constitutional right to privacy and warns that the memorandum of understanding’s terms create a risk of improper voter purges built on federal data-matching the plaintiffs argue Alaska never independently verified. The suit asks the court to order destruction of the DOJ’s copies of the data, void the memorandum of understanding entirely, and permanently enjoin any further unredacted transfer of the voter file. As of this writing, the case remains pending in Anchorage Superior Court, with no ruling yet issued.
Notably, the plaintiffs are not challenging the citizenship-verification letters covered in §01 and §02 — that mailing is a separate program the lawsuit does not name. The suit is narrower and more specific: it targets the December 2025 transfer itself, the unredacted format the data went out in, and what the plaintiffs say is inadequate legal authority under state law for sharing driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers with a federal agency outside Alaska’s control.
The lieutenant governor — Nancy Dahlstrom (R), who oversees the Division of Elections and authorized the December 2025 unredacted data transfer to the DOJ now being challenged in court.
The elections director — Carol Beecher (R), appointed by Dahlstrom, a registered Republican and past donor to both Dahlstrom and Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R), who testified that stale DMV data — not a wave of noncitizen registrations — drove the letter spike.
Every official named in this story who administers Alaska’s elections is a Republican. The lawsuit against them was brought by the ACLU, EPIC, and progressive-leaning civic groups — not by any Democratic officeholder. This piece names both sides’ affiliations accurately rather than forcing either into a frame the facts don’t support.
Alaska’s letters arrive amid a much larger national fight over noncitizen voter-roll checks. On July 17, 2026, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to the secretaries of state of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, alleging tens of thousands of “potential noncitizens” remained on their rolls — as many as 190,832 in California alone. Nevada’s secretary of state called the DHS figures “wildly speculative.”
Alaska was not one of the four states in that federal push, and its citizenship-letter program is not part of it. The 3,048 letters trace to Alaska’s own state-level, quarterly DMV-to-voter-roll comparison — a process the state has run for years, independent of Secretary Mullin’s letters and independent of the DOJ memorandum of understanding Dahlstrom signed in December. The two threads intersect only in the sense that both put Alaska’s voter-data practices in the news in the same month; they are otherwise separate programs, run by separate officials, on separate timelines.
Alaska’s Division of Elections sent 3,048 registered voters a letter asking them to verify their citizenship, a figure more than fifteen times the normal quarterly yield of the state’s DMV-to-voter-roll comparison. Elections Director Carol Beecher (R) attributes the spike to stale data, not a wave of noncitizen registrations, and says no one is being disenfranchised. Separately, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) is being sued by the ACLU, EPIC, and allied civic groups over a December 2025 decision to send the DOJ Alaska’s complete, unredacted voter file — a case that remains unresolved. Both matters involve Republican officials administering Alaska’s elections, challenged in one case by progressive civil-liberties groups; this story names every affiliation accurately rather than forcing a frame the facts don’t support.
