More cases of illegal voting are coming to light as GOP scrubs voter rolls

Jose Ceballos never attained U.S. citizenship, yet according to voting records, he managed to cast ballots in at least two dozen elections dating back to 2006.

He may have been voting before that, but that’s as far back as the Kansas secretary of state’s records go.

That Mr. Ceballos was serving as mayor of Coldwater, a town near the Oklahoma border, makes the case all the more astonishing.

His case arose just weeks after Ian Roberts, then the superintendent of public schools in Des Moines, Iowa, was arrested as being an illegal immigrant — and it quickly became clear he’d been registered to vote in Maryland for years, even though he’d been working out of the state since at least 2015. He last re-registered to vote in Maryland a year after that, in December 2016.

They were the marquee examples of illegal voting, but by no means the only ones in 2025.

Federal authorities brought voting cases against at least 10 other immigrants this year, accusing them of casting ballots despite not having attained U.S. citizenship.

That included Carlos Jose Abreu, sentenced to 65 months in prison for illegal voting, aggravated identity theft and firearms violations, and Haoxiang Gao, who authorities said voted in 2024 then called election officials trying to recant his vote, then fled the U.S. to avoid prosecution.

It also includes 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 it includes 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.

The White House’s Department of Government Efficiency was credited with helping to bring several of the cases to light.

The advent of the Trump administration marked a major shift 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.

And the Justice Department has been doing its own review. So far, it’s run 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.

Texas has independently announced it ran its 18 million-name voter list through the federal database and flagged about 2,800 names as potential noncitizens.

Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has battled to expose noncitizens on voter rolls, hailed those kinds of efforts and challenged Democrat-led states to do the same.

He specifically called on Maryland, where Mr. Roberts twice registered, to sign up to use the federal database.

Mr. Adams also called the 10 federally charged cases “the tip of the iceberg.”

“There probably are not enough Assistant US Attorneys available to prosecute all of the foreigners on American voter rolls,” he said.

Mr. Roberts, the former superintendent in Des Moines, drew outsized attention after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers caught up with him in Iowa. They said they found him in possession of firearms — which illegal immigrants are barred from having.

The school system said Mr. Roberts, from Guyana, had falsely claimed he was a citizen and presented a driver’s license and Social Security card to clear his work authorization checks.

He made similar claims of citizenship at least twice in Maryland, when he registered to vote in 2011 and 2016, according to documents obtained by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

There is no record of him casting a ballot in Maryland.

But that’s not the case for Mr. Ceballos in Kansas.

The Washington Times was unable to reach Mr. Ceballos. The number on his voting registration, obtained by The Times in an open-records request, is not currently valid. A message left through the city government wasn’t returned.

But in an interview last month with The Journal, Mr. Ceballos said he believed his green card, signifying legal permanent residency, allowed him to vote.

And it raises questions about whether he’s an anomaly or a symptom of a deeper problem.

One friend, Ryan Swayze, told The Journal that Mr. Ceballos first registered in 1991, when he was 20 years old, and that was because a local county clerk told him it was OK.

According to cases reviewed by The Times, that’s a common explanation for legal immigrants, who say they were told — or at least not stopped — by motor vehicle department clerks, voter registration volunteers and others who signed them up.

Mr. Ceballos resigned as mayor earlier this month. The town posted the move on its Facebook page, among other posts seeking to connect owners with lost dogs.

He canceled his voter registration on Oct. 17.

A month later, he was charged with illegal voting.

The Department of Homeland Security revealed he had been granted a green card in 1990. He was convicted of battery in 1995. And he had applied for U.S. citizenship in February.

DHS said if he is convicted of the new charges against him, he will face deportation proceedings.

He had won a seat on the city council in Coldwater four times, the last two as mayor — including in November, just days before Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach announced the charges against him.

Mr. Ceballos was a registered Republican and his voting record is replete with ballots cast in GOP primaries, including the primaries in 2006, 2010, 2016, 2020, 2022 and 2024.

He told The Journal he figures that he voted for Mr. Kobach in four different state elections, and voted for President Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.