For something supposed to be rare, noncitizens do seem to be voting a lot.
The Justice Department is averaging more than a case a day against noncitizens it accuses of illegally casting ballots, as it seeks to put concrete examples behind President Trump’s claim that foreign nationals are unlawfully voting in U.S. elections.
On Wednesday alone, prosecutors announced charges against 11 more people. They added another case Thursday.
People were interested in these podcasts
Ten of those charged were in Minnesota and indicted on Sept. 24. Nine were accused of voting in the 2024 presidential election, and the other was accused of voting in the 2022 congressional election.
Another case was announced in Florida, where a man was accused of casting an illegal ballot in Citrus County.
Also on Sept. 24, prosecutors announced nine charges, including four noncitizens in Pennsylvania, two in New Jersey, and one each in Kansas, Texas and Florida.
All told, the Justice Department and Homeland Security Department announced nearly 50 cases in September alone.
By comparison, the Biden Justice Department brought just 13 cases in total over its four years.
The increase has analysts wondering whether the rate of fraud increased or whether something else is at work.
Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said that, if anything, fraud has declined in recent years. What has changed is the government, with some states flagging cases more often, federal investigators looking for more cases and prosecutors now eager to charge them.
“Finally, officials are doing what they could have been doing for the last 20 years, and that’s taking easily accessible data and prosecuting people for crimes,” said Mr. Adams, who worked in the voting rights section at Justice Department before leading the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Celina Stewart, CEO at the League of Women Voters, said the timing of the Justice Department’s wave of cases is suspect.
“I worry that things like this could create a chilling effect for voters,” she told The Washington Times.
She sought to put the numbers in context by saying the several dozen new cases announced are a tiny fraction of a percent of the 153 million people who voted in 2024.
“The league has never maintained that noncitizen voting is impossible, or that individual violations do not occur,” she said. “The relevant question is whether or not the available evidence demonstrates it’s a widespread problem and whether the proposed responses are proportionate and protect eligible voters.”
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said the surge in cases should cause voting rights groups to take a second look.
“These are the cases we’ve been able to develop so far,” he said at a press conference last week. “There are thousands more in the chute. And the folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist that this has never happened, that there is no voter fraud. So when we have dozens of cases that we brought just in the last few weeks, I think that discourages and defeats their characterizations.”
The rate of noncitizen voting is unknown.
Ms. Stewart declined to hazard a guess.
Mr. Adams said he figures the actual prevalence is hundreds of times larger than the number of prosecutions.
Still, he said, the attention to the issue has likely made the practice rarer than it used to be. He guessed that fewer noncitizens voted in the 2024 election than did in previous contests.
One limitation for the Justice Department is the statute of limitations, which is only five years for noncitizen voting cases.
That means only votes in 2022 and 2024 can be charged.
Homeland Security Investigations, a part of the deportation agency U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is moving to fill that gap.
Cases older than five years can still be deemed to negate an immigrant’s legal status, making them deportable, and HSI agents have been bringing those cases.
“HSI has long had authority to pursue removal proceedings where the facts support removability under the Immigration and Nationality Act, including for unlawful voting or false claims to U.S. citizenship,” HSI said in a statement to The Times. “DHS is using available lawful information-sharing and investigative tools to identify cases where immigration enforcement action is appropriate.”
The Homeland Security Department said: “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”
Among the 10 new cases charged in Minnesota, three of those accused were Liberian and one apiece from Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Lithuania and South Africa.
It was unclear from the court documents what the exact legal status of those 10 was.
The four charged in Pennsylvania were one Haitian, two Mexicans and one person from Trinidad and Tobago. Two were legal permanent residents, and two were illegal immigrants.
One of those authorities was identified as Cliff Sanon, the Haitian, whose asylum application was denied and who had been ordered deported. The immigration judge said he could not be sent back to Haiti, specifically, because he could be persecuted in his home country.
He was accused of voting in the 2022 election by mail, but authorities said he had registered to vote at least eight times from 2022 through this year — including on Sep. 20, 2024, when he registered twice that day.
Mr. Sanon checked the box claiming citizenship on six of the applications. Once he left the checkbox blank, and another time, in May 2024, he even checked “No,” but his registration remained active.
When investigators interviewed him, he said he registered to create a “proof of address.”
He said he kept signing up through registration drives. Asked why he kept checking whether he was a citizen when he was not, he said, “They just handed me a clipboard.”
“I knew I was doing something that was not legit,” he told investigators, according to court documents.
In yet another case, announced Thursday by federal prosecutors in Wisconsin, authorities charged a woman from North Macedonia with illegal voting.
Sara Luma registered and voted the same day in the 2024 presidential election, the Justice Department said.
She was arrested by immigration officers this summer as she flew back to the U.S. on a flight from Austria. Prosecutors said she was allowed to self-deport but will face criminal arrest on the voting case warrant if she tries to return.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.