Less than 24 hours before polls opened for Election Day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had charged 63 people in 15 states with voting illegally, including a Samoan national who allegedly voted in Utah in 2024.
Attorney General Todd Blanche called Monday’s announcement, made on the eve of the midterm elections, “the largest wave of voter fraud arrests since President Trump returned to office.”
“These foreign nationals allegedly took advantage of the trust of the American people and flouted the laws that govern elections in our country,” Blanche said in a press release. “This Department of Justice will continue to investigate and prosecute voter fraud in order to restore confidence in our election system. »
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal or state elections. The Samoan national is accused of voting illegally in Utah during the 2024 presidential election, according to court records. Their gender was not clear from the records.
The Tribune is not naming the accused voter at this time because it generally does not cover low-level criminal charges.
They were arrested in Alaska last week and charged with a Class A misdemeanor. At a court hearing Friday, they denied the allegations, then were assigned a public defender and released, according to court records.
If convicted of the offense, the Samoan national faces up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.
Nearly 200 people charged in about half the states
The Justice Department said it charged 195 people in 25 states with voting or registering to vote illegally in the past nine weeks.
In some cases, the individuals voted in multiple elections, including a North Carolina woman who voted in the last nine general and primary elections.
The New York Times contacted a number of those charged and reported that some had been given information about how to register to vote or had been contacted by canvassers and believed they were eligible to vote due to confusion and language barriers.
Since his 2020 election defeat, President Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, that U.S. elections were rife with widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens.
In May, an audit of Utah’s voter database found that 99.72 percent of registered voters were verifiable U.S. citizens. The review of more than 2 million voter registration records identified approximately 27 suspected non-citizens, whose names were immediately removed from the voter rolls, and 25 potential non-citizens, who were given 30 days to provide proof of citizenship.
According to the audit, about 13 of those people voted. Nearly all of the 52 non-citizens or probable non-citizens were lawful permanent residents or people who were brought to the United States as children and remain subject to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — commonly known as DACA — immigration policy.
Search for widespread electoral fraud
Monday’s announcement comes in the eleventh hour of an election cycle in which Trump’s Republican Party is struggling to maintain control of Congress. In the months leading up to the election, his administration unsuccessfully attempted to establish evidence of widespread voter fraud, and in doing so, defamed election officials.
Over the last year, the Trump administration has sued top election officials in Utah and 29 other states as well as Washington, D.C., after they refused to turn over complete, unredacted copies of their voter rolls.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said the DOJ had no legal basis for the request and that it violated Utah’s data privacy laws. The department later revealed in a letter that it was investigating her, as well as other election officials it was suing.
A federal judge threw out the case against Henderson last week. The DOJ has so far failed to obtain voter databases: district courts have launched 26 other similar lawsuits across the country.
In its hunt for electoral fraud, the Trump administration has also attacked mail-in voting.
The DOJ announced in September that a federal grand jury had indicted a Utah postal worker, Damon Matai Seei, for delaying or destroying mail after allegedly throwing hundreds of mail-in ballots into the dumpster at a church in Eagle Mountain.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a news conference announcing the charges that the postal worker’s alleged actions demonstrated that “voter fraud is real.” Seei, who was filling in for a colleague, told investigators he felt “overwhelmed” and attributed his decision to “laziness.”
Auditors have repeatedly concluded — including in a review of the June primaries — that they “did not observe significant fraud” in Utah’s election. A recent study commissioned by the Legislature and conducted by Utah Valley University declared the state’s elections to be “highly secure.”
This year, in an unprecedented move, the DOJ is deploying a thousand election observers to all 50 states. About a dozen of these election observers will be stationed in Salt Lake County.
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