The Justice Department charged three noncitizens with voting in Ohio, a year after the state made 167 federal referrals of noncitizens who appeared to cast ballots in the state.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose noted that’s only “so far.” His office has referred more than 1,000 election fraud cases from even-numbered years to the U.S. Department of Justice, and other cases to various local prosecutors at the state or local level.
While the Justice Department has ramped up prosecutions of noncitizens across the country, the gap between identifying potential election offenses and prosecuting them reflects, in part, the limited resources and competing priorities of local prosecutors,.
“It’s difficult to get county prosecutors to prosecute voter fraud cases. They become prosecutors to go after murderers and rapists,” LaRose told the Daily Signal.
LaRose, first elected in 2018, has removed about 1,300 ineligible voters, which include noncitizens, from the state’s rolls. The number also includes dead people and those registered in other states during his time in office.
Ohio is among a handful of states with highly competitive races that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Republican Sen. Jon Husted is fending off a challenge from former Democrat Sen. Sherod Brown.
The Trump administration made the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database available to state election officials last year to verify the citizenship of registered voters. Numerous states have used the system.
Before the database was made available, Texas removed more than 1 million from the voter rolls between 2021 and 2024, which included noncitizens, deceased people, people who moved, and people with felony convictions.
Last year, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office reported 277 confirmed noncitizens registered to vote after checking records through the federal SAVE database. Of these, 35 had ballots counted in the 2024 general election and five attempted ballots were rejected. A spokesman for Pate did not respond to questions about whether the names were removed, or whether the illegal voters were prosecuted.
Even in Texas, which has strong laws to protect against voter fraud, there is a lengthy process for removal of registered voters.
“In Texas, voter registrations are based in counties,” said Alicia Pierce, spokeswoman for Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden. “If we have reason to believe that a registered voter may be a noncitizen, we refer that to counties for their review and investigation.”
Inaccurate voter registration could be a clerical error, as opposed to actual illegal voting, which would be a crime.
In September, Howden’s office referred 117 cases to state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office for investigation of potential noncitizen voting.
North Carolina removed 747,274 ineligible voters in 2023 and 2024 and another 498,889 in the first quarter of 2025. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced charges against 10 noncitizens in North Carolina for allegedly casting ballots.
Maine removed 217,262 canceled registrations in 2025. Two individuals in the state were prosecuted for duplicate voting in the 2020 election.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel reported 16 referrals in 2025 and another 22 referrals in 2026 concerning suspected noncitizen voting. She brought five prosecutions in August. Meanwhile, Alaska took 3,048 names off the active registration list in 2026.
Last month in Kansas, two separate federal grand juries indicted two noncitizens for voting in the state. Also, state Attorney General Kris Kobach has led prosecutions against several noncitizens who voted, including Jose Ceballos-Armendariz, the former mayor of Coldwater, Kansas.
Homeland Security Investigations has made most of the arrests of noncitizen voters. The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security are “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” a DHS spokesperson told the Daily Signal.
The DHS accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross-referenced them with known illegal aliens in making the arrests.
“Since April 2025, more than 24,000 cases have been identified by SAVE as potential non-U.S. citizens who were on voter rolls, and those cases have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the DHS spokesperson added.
LaRose said that if the SAVE America Act passed in Congress, the bill, which would require voter ID and proof of citizenship to register in federal elections, would have no real effect on Ohio. The state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles already checks citizenship, so Ohio has been able to catch about 85% of noncitizens that might attempt to vote, he said
“I created the first-in-the-nation election integrity unit in the secretary of state’s office,” LaRose said. “Before, staffers would work to collect information, but they weren’t trained investigators. Now, we hire retired police officers, who can retire early, who know how to do investigations to do high quality investigations. We then refer that information to county prosecutors.
“We gathered the evidence from even-numbered years, federal elections, and submitted it to the Justice Department, which only has jurisdiction over federal elections,” he said.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
