In some cases, people have been voting for almost 20 years without being citizens…
By Catholics for Catholics
Federal authorities have been filing voting cases against several immigrants this year, accusing them of casting ballots despite not having achieved U.S. citizenship.
According to a story by The Washington Times, in one instance, Jose Ceballos never became a U.S. citizenship, but according to voting records, he was able to cast ballots in at least two dozen elections dating back to 2006. His case is even more bewildering: Ceballos was the mayor of Coldwater, a town near the Oklahoma border.
But Ceballos case is far from being the only one. There is Ian Roberts, then the superintendent of public schools in Des Moines, Iowa, who was detained as being an illegal immigrant — and it rapidly was unearthed that he has been registered to vote in Maryland for years, even though he’d been working out of the state since at least 2015.
Roberts last re-registered to vote in Maryland a year after that, in December 2016. Ceballos and Roberts were the prime examples of illegal voting, but in 2025, there were many more cases.
The White House’s Department of Government Efficiency was praised with helping to bring several of the cases to light.
The arrival of the Trump administration denoted a major turn in the issue. Homeland Security, which in the past had been accused of hindering states that wanted to run their voter registration rolls through government databases, moved to streamline the process and cut fees.
Also, the Justice Department has been conducting its own review. So far, it’s probed 47.5 million names from states’ voter rolls and found “several thousand noncitizens” registered to vote, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon revealed earlier this month.
According to The Times, there are more cases, including Carlos Jose Abreu, who was sentenced to 65 months in prison for illegal voting, a firearms violation and aggravated identity theft. In another instance, there is the case of Haoxiang Gao, who authorities said voted in 2024 then called election officials trying to retract his vote, then escaped the U.S. to dodge prosecution.
The cases also include Denis Bouchard, a Canadian whom prosecutors said has voted in elections in North Carolina for more than 20 years despite never actually attaining citizenship.
And there is the case of Svitlana Demydenko and her daughter Yelyzaveta, Ukrainian immigrants who are accused of voting in Florida in 2024 despite not being citizens. They have entered not guilty pleas.
Read and Share
