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DOJ Charges Noncitizens With Illegal Voting

6 sources · updated 2026-10-27
Left 33% Center 0% Right 67%
2 left · 0 center · 4 right

What happened

Ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, the Justice Department charged 48 noncitizens in California, Florida, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania with federal crimes including voting in federal elections and making false claims of U.S. citizenship to register or vote; 28 of those charged were in California, and all but one were lawful permanent residents, with Cuban national Alfredo Santiesteban alleged to have voted as a noncitizen in the 2024 general election. Several defendants, including lawful permanent residents Omar Alexander Muñoz of Belize and Maribel del Carmen Garcés Barriga of Ecuador, were also accused of lying on later naturalization applications about having registered or voted. The same Monday, acting U.S. attorney Neil Floyd asked Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs—whose state has more than 5 million registered voters and mails ballots to all of them—to review a list of more than 400 registrants the department believes are noncitizens, who it said had cast more than 1,500 ballots in prior elections, and to sequester any ballots they might cast; Hobbs’s office said it was reviewing the list. The request followed a similar Justice Department demand that California sequester mail ballots from about 20,000 suspected noncitizens; a federal appeals court that Monday declined the administration’s requested expedited timeline and sent the California case back to a lower court.
Sourcing check · Fully on the record · 6 articles

6 of 6 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.

What these terms mean and how they're counted
On the record · names a source 6 of 6
On the record means the article cites a source by name for the story's main claim: a person, or an institution speaking officially, such as a company statement or a named agency's spokesperson. The opposite is an unnamed source. The count is how many of the counted articles cite at least one such source; the names are everyone named across them, each once however the articles spell it. Here: Neil Floyd, Steve Hobbs, Charles Neil Floyd, Justice Department and Department of Justice
Primary evidence · cites a document or data 4 of 6
Primary evidence means the article cites a record you could check yourself: a court filing or ruling, a dataset or report, a recording or transcript, an official statement or press release, market data. A quote is not a document. The count is how many articles cite one. Here: letter, charging documents, DOJ announcement
Credits another outlet 0 of 6
The article says the story comes from another outlet's reporting (“first reported by Reuters”). Those articles relay the story; they are not independent confirmation. Here: Each article presents its own reporting.
Unnamed sources 0 of 6
The main claim is attributed to people who are not identified: “people familiar with the matter”, “officials said”. The count is how many articles do this.
How it developed
When the first report landed and whether it named anyone; when the first named source and the first document appeared. Here: First report Oct 26, 07:30 UTC by Daily Wire, naming its source. First document in the first report, from Daily Wire (charging documents).
Not counted 0
Opinion, analysis and video pieces, and articles too short to assess. Every count above is out of the counted articles. An article republished under a new headline is one article.
This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out

Unpacked

Left-leaning coverage never reported that the Justice Department charged 48 noncitizens with illegal voting. NBC News and the Guardian instead covered a same-day request that Washington sequester ballots from more than 400 people federal officials say may not be citizens. Right-leaning coverage that carried the charges treated them as the day's story. A reader of the left-leaning outlets would not learn that anyone had been charged. Right-leaning coverage leads with named defendants who allegedly voted and then lied on citizenship applications. Left-leaning coverage leads with the administration having "targeted another Democratic-led state." The sequester request and a California court setback sit at the top of those left-leaning accounts. How many of the people on the Washington and California suspect lists are among those actually charged?
Bottom line

The Washington Examiner put 28 of the charged noncitizens in California, cases that left-leaning write-ups of that day's DOJ election push never mentioned.

The receipts — 3 facts one side's coverage lacks
  • All but one of the 48 accused are lawful permanent residents numberin Daily Wire · absent from left-leaning coverage
  • Irish-born lawful permanent resident Eoin Cranney admitted to agents he registered and voted in 2024 knowing he lacked citizenship individual casein Daily Wire · absent from left-leaning coverage
  • Cuban national Alfredo Santiesteban, the only illegal immigrant among those charged, allegedly voted in the 2024 general election individual casein Daily Wire · absent from left-leaning coverage
The Left View
Left-leaning sources frame the Washington sequestration request, announced in the same period as the prosecutions, as part of a Trump administration effort to “inject the federal government into tallying and certifying” Democratic-led states’ midterms and to “sow doubts about the election or its outcome” in races that will help determine control of Congress. They argue noncitizen voting is “exceptionally rare,” a crime with a paper trail and penalties including deportation, and that people appear on suspect lists because there is no comprehensive roster of U.S. citizens—newly naturalized citizens are frequently flagged. Hobbs said the state would “only respond to requests that follow due process,” that Washingtonians should not be “harassed,” and that the timing one week before the election “is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results”; his office noted the federal data included a last vote as far back as 1994. NBC News reported election experts saying nothing in federal law gives the Justice Department authority to intervene in certification or ballot counting, and coverage pointed to the same-day California setback and a Los Angeles County filing that a sample of that state’s federal list included canceled or inactive registrations, people with no voting history, and voters who appeared to have been born in the United States.
The Right View
Right-leaning sources present the 48 charges as concrete proof that noncitizens have registered and voted, highlighting defendants alleged to have voted across multiple elections from 2020 onward and then lied on citizenship applications, and reporting that New York defendant Eoin Cranney admitted to agents “in substance and in part” that he was not a citizen, had registered in 2024, and had voted knowing he lacked citizenship. They cast the cases as part of a midterm crackdown on illegal voting that includes attempts to audit state rolls, which they say several Democratic-run states have resisted. On Washington, Floyd said investigators had “confirmed with high confidence that non-citizens are voting,” called the identified cases “only the tip of the iceberg,” and said he was “confident that we are looking at thousands”; he attributed the slow, person-by-person work to the state’s refusal to share its complete voter database with identifying information. These outlets also tie the prosecutions to the California effort to keep mail ballots from suspected noncitizens from being counted until citizenship is verified.
Our Take (balanced)
The right’s strongest argument is that these are not abstract claims: prosecutors filed 48 federal cases with named defendants, at least one reported admission, alleged voting across multiple cycles, and accompanying naturalization fraud, which establishes that some noncitizens did cast ballots. The left’s strongest argument is that a few hundred Washington matches—some decades old—in a state of more than 5 million registered voters, plus error-prone list comparisons illustrated by Los Angeles County’s sample of the related California list, do not show outcome-relevant illegal voting, while last-minute sequestration demands collide with the Elections Clause assignment of congressional election rules to the states and with what NBC-cited experts described as an absence of Justice Department authority over counting and certification. The central unresolved tension is whether documented individual crimes and federal-state record matches are evidence of a larger illegal-voting problem that warrants intervening in ballots still being cast, or whether they are rare, noisy cases being used to contest election administration the federal government does not control.

6 sources

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