Justice Department Charges 48 Noncitizens With Election Crimes in Five States a Week Before the Midterms

The Justice Department said on October 26 that it has charged 48 noncitizens with election-related crimes in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and Nevada. The cases cover illegal voting in federal elections and false claims of US citizenship made to register or vote.

The charges sit in ten federal districts. California accounts for 28 defendants: 13 in the Central District, six in the Eastern District, five in the Northern District and four in the Southern District. Pennsylvania has nine, split between the Eastern and Middle districts. Florida has six, all in the Middle District. New York has four and Nevada one. The release quotes no official and names no investigating agency beyond “federal agents” who interviewed some defendants.

Who Is Charged and With What

Almost all of the defendants are described as lawful permanent residents, people with green cards who can live and work in the United States but can’t vote in federal elections. One Pennsylvania defendant is described as being in the country illegally. The countries of citizenship run from Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines to Canada, Poland, Kenya, Israel and the Netherlands.

Most of the alleged votes were cast in the 2022 and 2024 general elections. A few cases reach back to 2020, and one Eastern District of California defendant is accused of voting in three elections up to the June 2026 primary. The charges differ by district. Voting by an alien in a federal election under 18 U.S.C. 611 is a misdemeanor with a maximum of one year in prison. Several districts added felony counts for false citizenship claims or for lying on naturalization applications. In the Central District of California, five of the 13 defendants are not accused of casting a ballot. Their cases involve registration or false statements in the naturalization process. As the department noted, every defendant is presumed innocent.

The California cases are not new. The 28 defendants match the group federal prosecutors in California announced on October 19: 22 accused of voting, five accused only of registering and one who cast a provisional ballot in 2020. The October 26 release gathers them with cases from four other states.

A Running Count Before November 3

Earlier releases this month set the pattern. On October 5 the department announced 16 defendants in Florida, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota. On October 12 it announced charges against 16 more people for illegal voting and related election crimes, not all of them noncitizens, in states including Alabama, New Mexico and Ohio. We covered the earlier charges and the push for federal election powers at the time. Federal prosecutors in California said on October 19 that about 113 noncitizens had been charged in 20 states over the previous two months.

The announcements run alongside civil actions. The department sued California on October 15 to stop it counting mail ballots sent to more than 20,000 registrants that federal officials call likely noncitizens. On October 26 federal prosecutors gave Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs 48 hours to stop tabulating ballots from 405 voters on a separate list. In the California case, Judge David O. Carter asked why the government needed a court order when it could charge individual voters, telling a federal prosecutor to “go out and indict.”

What State Officials Report

The prosecutions are real cases. The question state officials keep raising is scale.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the 28 California charges amount to about 0.0001 percent of the state’s roughly 23 million registered voters. He said voter fraud is wrong and should be prosecuted, but that the numbers show no widespread fraud. Nevada officials said DHS claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizens were on the state’s rolls but sent only 185 names, and that all 185 were confirmed citizens.

Republican officials who ran their own checks found small numbers too. In October 2024, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said a citizenship audit found 20 noncitizens among about 8.2 million registered voters, nine of whom had voted at some point. In October 2025, Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said a check through the federal SAVE system flagged about 240 potential noncitizens out of about 1.8 million registrants, and that 30 to 40 were believed to have voted. Jester’s initial count of about 300 dropped after some of those flagged turned out to be naturalized citizens whose records hadn’t been updated.

Each case still matters under the law, and a noncitizen vote in a federal election is a crime whatever the count. What the state figures show is the gap between dozens of prosecutions and the tens of thousands of names federal agencies have put forward in court and in letters to election officials. In Los Angeles County, a sample of 200 names from the federal list turned up many registrations that were inactive or canceled. More than a quarter listed a US birthplace.

The charges will move through the courts over months. The lists will be tested sooner, in counties that have to decide this week how to handle ballots already in hand.