(The Epoch Times)—The Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Jan. 6 that it is suing Arizona and Connecticut for allegedly failing to turn over their full voter registration rolls for federal inspection.
The two new federal lawsuits, which claim that the two states are hindering federal oversight that is intended to stop election fraud and ensure voter list accuracy, bring the department’s nationwide total to 23 states plus the District of Columbia.
Before the most recent lawsuits were filed, the DOJ on Dec. 18, 2025, filed lawsuits against Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, alleging they failed to produce voter registration lists upon request. Earlier the same month, the DOJ filed similar lawsuits against Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington state, also for allegedly not producing the lists upon request.
U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said on Jan. 6 that the DOJ will continue to file lawsuits “to protect American elections.”
“Accurate voter rolls are the foundation of election integrity, and any state that fails to meet this basic obligation of transparency can expect to see us in court,” Bondi said in a statement.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said that the department “is committed to safeguarding fair and free elections, and will hold states accountable when they refuse to respect … federal elections laws.”
The lawsuits state that the U.S. attorney general is responsible for enforcing the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, which Congress passed to make sure states have effective voter registration and voter list maintenance programs. The U.S. attorney general also enforces the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allows her to demand that states produce statewide voter registration lists.
The Arizona lawsuit states that Bondi asked Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in July 2025 to produce a copy of his state’s voter registration list within 14 days.
Fontes responded, saying he could not comply with the 14-day deadline, and Bondi gave him an extension to September 2025. Two weeks before the new deadline, Fontes informed Bondi that he could not comply because doing so would violate state and federal privacy laws, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges Fontes’s refusal to produce the requested records violates the information-production provisions of the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit asks the court to order Fontes to produce the records.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told The Epoch Times that “Arizonans’ private voter registration information is not up for grabs.”
“Both state and federal law prohibit the unrestricted release of Arizona’s complete voter registration database to the DOJ,” she said. “My office will continue to work with the Secretary of State to defend the private data of Arizona voters and safeguard our independent election systems.”
Fontes said in a statement on Dec. 19, 2025, that he declined to hand over the voter rolls to the DOJ out of voter privacy concerns.
“Arizona voters also have important privacy rights that cannot be infringed because they choose to exercise their constitutionally protected voting rights,” he said.
The Connecticut lawsuit states that in August 2025, Bondi asked Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas to produce the state’s voter registration list. Thomas handed over some of the requested data and said more data would follow, but she did not send more information.
Bondi sent a letter in December 2025 demanding the list. Later that month, Thomas responded, saying she could not comply because Connecticut law forbids her from releasing the information sought.
The lawsuit says that Thomas’s failure to hand over the list violates the information-production provisions of the Civil Rights Act and asks the court to compel Thomas to do so.
Thomas said she was not surprised that Connecticut has been “added to the long list of states being sued on these grounds.”
She told The Epoch Times that as secretary of state, her “foremost responsibility” is to Connecticut voters “who entrust the state and their local election officials with sensitive data so they can participate in our representative democracy without fear that their information will be misused or exposed.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said Connecticut obeys federal laws and that he was disappointed that his state is being sued.
“We tried to work cooperatively with DOJ to understand the basis for their request for our voters’ sensitive personal information. Rather than communicating productively with us, they rushed to sue,” Tong told The Epoch Times.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
