As thousands of North Carolinians went to the polls Thursday for the start of early voting in the 2026 midterms, state and federal officials held a press conference to announce charges of voter fraud against 10 people stemming from past election cycles.
All of them are accused of lying about their citizenship status to register to vote. Most of them were also charged with illegally casting a ballot in a federal election. The defendants. Nine of them are legal immigrants and permanent U.S. residents but not U.S. citizens, according to prosecutors.
“We either protect the sanctity of ‘one citizen, one vote’ or we allow the destruction and hollowing out of America by non-citizens,” U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle, the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of North Carolina, told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Raleigh Thursday. “It is wrong. It is antithetical to the law. And we will not tolerate it.”
Earlier in the day, eight of the defendants — wearing restraints in their hands and ankles — went before a federal judge, who read them their charges before releasing them without having to pay bond. Prosecutors said they weren’t considered a flight risk and therefore didn’t need to be detained.
None have yet indicated whether they plan to plead guilty or not guilty, and any trials would likely be months away if not longer. If convicted, they could be sentenced to years in prison.
The defendants include natives of Germany, Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, El Salvador and the now-defunct nation of Yugoslavia, prosecutors said. One is accused of being in the country illegally, in addition to having voted illegally.
The charges against them deal with years-old allegations, and the indictments were brought last week. When asked why their court hearings and the subsequent press conference weren’t held until the start of early voting on Thursday, Boyle indicated the timing was a coincidence, not politically motivated.
Two other people were charged with similar crimes earlier this year, bringing the total of pending voter fraud cases to 12. That’s less than 0.0002% of the state’s 7.9 million registered voters. But Boyle said it was important to highlight the work his office, as well as state elections officials, are doing on this — particularly for people who are losing faith in elections.
“Even one criminal act of illegal voting undermines the entire system,” Boyle said. “Because the legitimacy of our elections depend not only on the actual security of the system, but also on the confidence that our citizens have in it. Perception is reality. And citizens believe the process is riddled with fraud.”
