The Minnesota Secretary of State's Office has received a grand jury subpoena ordering it to turn over certain individual voter records, as part of a federal investigation into whether non-citizens are registered or have unlawfully cast ballots, sources with direct knowledge told CBS News.

The investigation, which is being run by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, appears to represent an escalation in an ongoing dispute between states and the federal government over efforts to review states' voter rolls.

Federal prosecutors and investigators are seeking records pertaining to more than 125 individuals, one of the sources said. The records the department is seeking do not include the ballots themselves. To date, no one has been criminally charged.

The criminal investigation is separate from civil litigation that is currently pending against Minnesota by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which is trying to convince a federal judge to force the state to hand over a complete unredacted voter registration list. The DOJ is suing dozens of other states and the District of Columbia over the same issue.

The Minnesota Secretary of State's office declined to confirm or deny the issuance of subpoenas, citing grand jury secrecy rules. But the office said it is "aware of reporting by CBS News that we have received a grand jury subpoena related to an investigation into a small number of individual voters."

"Election security is a top priority of the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State," the office said. "While our office does not register voters or administer elections directly, we are committed to supporting the local election officials across our state who do to ensure that our elections continue to be fair, secure, and accurate."

In recent months the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have been coordinating law enforcement operations, in an effort to probe whether non-U.S. citizens are registered or may have voted in past elections.

In March 2025, President Trump ordered the Justice Department and DHS to probe whether non-citizens remained on voter registration lists. 

Mr. Trump has consistently brought up conspiracy theories suggesting that voter fraud is a widespread problem — a claim that has been widely debunked. He has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and in recent months the FBI has launched several investigations into the 2020 election in Arizona and Fulton County, Georgia.

In Minnesota specifically, there have been a total of 138 cases involving some sort of voter fraud between 2004 and 2025, according to data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.