The Justice Department on Friday charged 16 noncitizens in North Carolina, New York and Idaho with illegal voting, falsely claiming U.S. citizenship and related election crimes. Several of them allegedly voted in federal elections for years, and in some cases for decades, without ever being citizens.
The announcement came 18 days before the November 3 midterm elections. It is the second batch of 16 in less than a week.
Who was charged
Ten of the defendants were charged in the Eastern District of North Carolina for voting in the 2024 elections, according to the department’s release. Most face two counts: falsely claiming citizenship in order to vote, and voting as an alien.
Nine of the ten North Carolina defendants are lawful permanent residents, meaning green card holders. Green card holders may live and work in the United States, but they cannot vote in federal elections. The tenth, a 22-year-old from El Salvador, is described by the department as an illegal alien who registered and voted in the 2024 general election.
Some of the alleged voting records stretch back years:
- Ramona Abreu-Exia, 71, a German national, allegedly registered in 2004 and voted in eight general elections from 2004 through 2024, plus a 2008 primary.
- Gjina Gojcaj McDonald, 60, a national of the former Yugoslavia, allegedly voted in seven general elections from 2008 through 2024, a 2012 primary and a 2019 special election.
- Karl Fout, 73, a German national, allegedly voted in seven general elections from 2008 through 2024.
- Robert Harold Corbett, 69, a Canadian national, allegedly registered in 1998 and voted in general elections from then through 2024.
Others charged in North Carolina come from Jamaica, Haiti and Panama.
In the Northern District of New York, five green card holders from Britain, Bosnia and Canada were each charged with voting as an alien in an election that included a federal race. In Idaho, a 48-year-old Canadian green card holder was charged with voting in the 2022 general election.
All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court, the department noted.
What the charges carry
Voting as an alien in a federal election is punishable by up to one year in prison, and falsely claiming citizenship to register or vote carries up to five years, according to a Latin Times summary of the statutes involved.
Part of a larger push
Friday’s cases follow another round announced Monday, October 12, when the department charged 16 people. That group included a 64-year-old Cuban green card holder in Missouri who, prosecutors say, falsely claimed citizenship when he registered in 2004 and voted in at least 15 elections over about 20 years.
The Justice Department told Fox News Digital that the administration had charged 104 people with voter fraud-related offenses since January 2025, with 64 of those cases coming in roughly the previous five weeks, according to the Latin Times. That count came before Friday’s 16.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the administration brought nearly four times as many noncitizen-voting cases in under two years as the previous administration did in four.
“America’s elections are for Americans,” Colin McDonald, the assistant attorney general who leads the department’s Fraud Division, told Fox News in September.
The investigations are not slowing down. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in September that his department had more than 1,620 open cases, had made 151 arrests and was reviewing more than 300,000 suspected cases, a number he said was still growing.
How it went unnoticed
In most of the North Carolina cases, the core charge is the same: the defendant claimed to be a citizen when registering to vote. According to prosecutors, those claims then went unchallenged for years. One defendant allegedly registered in 1998. Another allegedly first registered in 2004.
Those are not cases of a single confused voter on a single Election Day. They are, if proven, records that sat on the rolls through multiple presidential elections until federal investigators took a closer look.
Some state election officials, including Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, have said such cases are extremely rare and that elections are run securely.
The bottom line
Every one of these defendants was allowed to live in America legally. None was allowed to vote in its federal elections. According to prosecutors, several did it anyway, election after election, and the system never caught them until federal investigators went looking.
Rare or not, each illegal ballot cancels out the vote of a citizen. In close races decided by a few hundred votes, that matters. And if prosecutors are right, a pattern that ran for 20 years without anyone noticing is not a sign of a system that works. It is a sign that nobody was checking.
With the midterms less than three weeks away, the message from the Justice Department is plain: the honor system is over. States that want their elections trusted should welcome that kind of checking, not fight it.