DOJ Only Charged 35 Aliens With Illegal Voting Out Of Thousands

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the federal government decided to only go after 35 criminal cases of aliens voting in American elections from 2001 to 2021 — the latest year for which data is available.

The suspiciously low number of prosecutions contrasts with thousands thousands of aliens having been registered to vote in recent years, and at least hundreds being flagged to the Justice Department as having actually cast a ballot. This calls into question the political motivations of those responsible for upholding federal election laws.

“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.

“They think it is unfair that aliens can’t register and vote. Plus, many of them thought, ‘Well, if they’re registering and voting, it will help our side,” von Spakovsky continued. “I think that’s clearly the motivation here. That’s why they weren’t interested in pursuing these cases.”

Von Spakovsky spoke about his experience as an election official in Fairfax County, Virginia, where his oversight in 2011 discovered nearly 300 aliens on the voter rolls in just that county alone. His research further revealed that 117 of them had actually voted.

The Fairfax County election board reported its findings to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which is responsible for prosecuting such crimes. At the time, that section was headed by Jack Smith, the same lawfare attorney appointed by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland to go after former President Donald Trump for posing questions about the integrity of the 2020 election.

“We took them off the rolls and then sent them over to DOJ, and DOJ did absolutely nothing about it,” von Spakovsky said. “They just ignored them.”

Despite reporting these people to the Justice Department at the time, BJS data shows that from 2010 to 2012 zero cases were brought under 18 U.S.C. 611: Voting by Aliens, a statute passed in the mid-1990s making it a crime for an alien to vote in federal elections.

According to the database, 58 cases were closed from 2001 to 2022, the last year from which data is available. It is unclear how many cases were filed prior to 2001. The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry from The Federalist.

Corporate media outlets and other left-wing organizations are insisting with increasing frequency that foreign citizens are not voting in U.S. elections in significant numbers and that such instances are “vanishingly rare.” But the millions of illegal aliens pouring into the country across its southern border and the tens of thousands who have been able to register to vote make the DOJ’s prosecution numbers hard for many to believe, even with the apathy von Spakovsky noted.

“[T]he United States has experienced a record number of border encounters since President Biden took office — nearly 10 million — many of whom have been released into, or evaded apprehension while entering, the U.S.,” a bicameral group of U.S. lawmakers wrote to Garland in July, asking about enforcement of 18 U.S.C. 611 since Biden took office. “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.”

A congressional staffer told The Federalist that the DOJ did not respond to the lawmakers’ letter, an indication the DOJ continues to keep the members of Congress in the dark about enforcement numbers. The DOJ did not respond to multiple requests for comment and confirmation of the numbers.

Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Virginia had removed 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls, who had either “accidentally or maliciously” registered. Youngkin did not go into detail about whether those voters had ever voted, but his state was not the only one with thousands of noncitizens registered to vote.

In 2019, the state of Pennsylvania admitted it had registered nearly 12,000 noncitizens to vote. The same year, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley had similarly found 95,000 noncitizens registered to vote, and further that 58,000 of them had voted at some point since 1996.

Earlier this year, research group Just Facts published a study showing that between 10 percent and 27 percent of noncitizens, or about two to five million, are illegally registered to vote. For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.