Yes, Foreign Nationals Have Voted In U.S. Elections

The leftist election integrity deniers at the Brennan Center for Justice will tell you that “noncitizens are not voting in federal or state elections.” They are wrong. So are the like-minded leftists at Time Magazine, who in 2017 arrogantly and falsely claimed, “Donald Trump is Wrong — Noncitzens Don’t Vote.”

Some do. They’re not allowed to vote in federal elections. It’s a felony. But they have  — in red states, blue states, and purple states. With the flood of illegal immigrants that has poured into the United States on the Biden-Harris administration’s watch, there are more foreign nationals showing up on the nation’s voter rolls. That means there will be more opportunities for noncitizens to slip through the Maginot Line of U.S. election security. 

It’s happening enough that the left’s messaging has been, let’s just say, nuanced of late. 

“We have seen the change of rhetoric from the left. From, ‘There are no cases’ to, ‘It’s so rare,’” Wisconsin state Sen. Dan Knodl, who has raised red flags about potentially thousands of noncitizens on the Badger State’s voter rolls, recently told me. “The prosecutions have proven that it’s certainly not nonexistent.” 

As Knodl and others note, however, the real rarity is law enforcement investigation and prosecution of voter fraud allegations, particularly incidents of foreign nationals casting ballots. So a true gauge of the problem is anything but definitive, despite what the usual suspects at the Associated Press and other members of the accomplice media feverishly insist. 

It’s No Myth

Last week, Angelica Maria Francisco, 42, of Russellville, Ala. was charged in U.S. District Court on false claims of citizenship in connection with voting, among a host of other fraud charges, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama. She has filed a plea agreement indicating that she will plead guilty to all of the charges, U.S. Attorney Prim F. Escalona noted in a press release.

Francisco, according to the charges, assumed the identity of a U.S. citizen in 2011, using the false identity to obtain a U.S. passport. 

“She subsequently used the United States passport to travel to and from her native country of Guatemala in 2012, 2015, and 2018,” the press release states. “Using the same false identity, Francisco also registered to vote in Alabama in 2016 and voted in the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections.”

In noting the charges, the Alabama Political Reporter dutifully declared that “research shows noncitizen voting is rare and overstated.” 

“Research” likes to ignore the 19 foreign nationals charged in 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. They were indicted on charges of voting in the 2016 federal elections, the result of a “years-long federal criminal investigation being conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Raleigh office,” ICE announced in a September 2020 press release. 

In a related North Carolina case in 2018, 19 other foreign nationals were charged with voting in the 2016 election. A 20th defendant was charged with “aiding and abetting a fellow defendant in falsely claiming United States citizenship in order to register to vote,” according to a 2018 press release for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. 

Per usual, corporate media outlets attempted to write off the charges and convictions as a misunderstanding. The Donald Trump-hating Washington Post went so far as to blame the president and other Republicans, charging that they were using the case and others “to portray illegal voting as a widespread phenomenon that threatens the integrity of American elections.” 

“A Washington Post examination of the effort in North Carolina found a complicated portrait of who is voting illegally and why — and exposed systemic problems that allowed noncitizens to register and cast ballots, in some cases without knowing they were breaking the law,” the Post reported. 

Said systemic problems have only gotten worse amid leftist groups working alongside federal agencies to register predominantly left-leaning voters. 

As Knodl noted, noncitizens voting in Wisconsin elections isn’t unheard of. Most recently, Ozaukee County prosecutors charged a Ukrainian woman late last year with election fraud after she voted in a local school board election. The woman admitted to the crime but claimed she didn’t understand the forms, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In April, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle charged noncitizen Lazaro Valle-Villar with four voting-related felonies. Records show Villar illegally voted in the November 2, 2021 election despite, the prosecutor’s office announced. 

“Lazaro Valle-Villar could have become a citizen and voted legally if he had just made the effort. However, he did not,” the prosecutor stated in a press release. 

Busy and Disinterested 

Corporate media have filled their publications and airwaves breathlessly defending the narrative that foreign nationals voting in federal and state elections is somewhere between “extremely rare” and “nonexistent.” They’ve stepped up the coverage as congressional Republicans have pushed for passage of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a bill that would require documented proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. But the media outlets rarely note that law enforcement officials have shown relatively little interest in investigating and prosecuting allegations of noncitizens voting. 

As my Federalist colleague Breccan F. Thies reported this week, the federal government prosecuted just 35 criminal cases of aliens voting in U.S. elections between 2001 and 2021. With the Department of Justice having flagged at least hundreds of foreign nationals casting ballots and reportedly thousands upon thousands more on the voter rolls, the dearth of prosecutions isn’t for lack of material. 

“I spent four years at the Justice Department as a career lawyer, and I can tell you that the career ranks of the Justice Department are filled with left-wing ideologues, and they just had no interest — they have no interest in going after aliens to prosecute them,” Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, told The Federalist in an interview.

Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. and Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.,  joined Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., in a letter this summer to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding answers for the lack of prosecutions of noncitizens casting ballots. 

“Plainly, there are opportunities for and instances of non-citizen voter registration, and so the critical question is whether the laws against doing so are being enforced by your Department,” the lawmakers wrote. “There appear to have been few prosecutions by your Department under these laws, and there is no indication that you have been pursuing cases in places like Georgia and Ohio where aliens have been caught registering or voting.”

Levi Fuller, assistant attorney general in the Texas AG’s office and former prosecutor with the office’s Election Integrity Division, candidly opined earlier this year that election fraud cases in general are anything but a priority in a lot of prosecutor’s offices. Fuller wrote in a column for the Texas Public Policy Foundation that the problem has been compounded by an “infamous Texas Court of Criminal Appeal’s decision in State v. Stephens issued in December 2021″ which concluded that “prosecution was a function solely contained within the Judicial Branch (i.e., not the Attorney General’s Office).”

“… [D]istrict Attorney’s offices are busy, and in my experience, a lot of them did not have the manpower, expertise, or the interest, to pursue allegations of election fraud, or go through the public scrutiny if they tried,” the law enforcement official wrote.  

‘Deeply Troubled’

A recent lawsuit filed in Waukesha County Court alleges the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is failing to work with the Wisconsin Elections Commission to verify the citizenship of applicants registering to vote. That includes matching “DOT’s citizenship information against [voter] registrant information in the WisVote list,” the state’s voter registration database. The lawsuit alleges thousands of foreign nationals may be on the swing state’s voter rolls. Knodl has demanded the DOT turn over the information to lawmakers and to elections officials. 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last month announced he was sending Lone Star State elections officials a “list of 95,000 registered voters” that should be vetted to confirm U.S. citizenship. 

Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit confirmed various left-wing nonprofits are operating voter booths outside state driver’s license offices, raising suspicions about the potential of foreign nationals being registered to vote.  

“Texans are deeply troubled by the possibility that organizations purporting to assist with voter registration are illegally registering noncitizens to vote in our elections,” Paxton said in a press release. “If eligible citizens can legally register to vote when conducting their business at a DPS office, why would they need a second opportunity to register with a booth outside? My office is investigating every credible report we receive regarding potential criminal activity that could compromise the integrity of our elections.” 

Last month, my Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood reported Gov. Glen Youngkin, R-Va., announced that the commonwealth’s Department of Elections “removed more than 6,300 noncitizens from its voter rolls since his administration took office.”

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose in recent months has asked local elections officials to remove hundreds of noncitizens from the Buckeye State’s voter rolls. Election integrity watchdog groups warn that there are thousands more in the database. 

Knodl, the Wisconsin state senator, said he’s “100 percent confident that some noncitizens will obtain a ballot” this presidential election season. 

“The history is there,” he said. “We’ve had prosecutions proving that it has happened, except in this counties that have ignored” the problem. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.