President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has turned its attention to illegal voting and has scoured records to discover and report the names of noncitizens who have registered and voted in U.S. elections.
Federal prosecutors are bringing cases based on the data.
In Florida, a Ukrainian mother and daughter have been charged in one case, and a Jamaican woman faces charges in another.
In New York, an Iraqi man was charged with casting a ballot in 2020 in Saratoga County.
Authorities said a Colombian man in Maryland who had been deported three times stole and lived under the identity of a U.S. citizen for decades and voted in 2020 and 2024.
To voter integrity groups, they are proof that noncitizens are casting ballots despite claims of Democratic state officials.
To voting rights advocates, the numbers are too low to draw big conclusions.
To DOGE, the effort is just getting started.
“The DOGE team has referred 57 cases of illegal aliens voting in the 2024 general election” to the Justice Department, DOGE adviser Katie Miller said on social media.
DOGE said the names were culled from a small sample of states.
J. Christian Adams, who used to work in the Justice Department’s voting rights section and now runs the Public Interest Legal Foundation, noted a major shift in people’s perceptions of illegal voting.
“Fourteen years ago, when I talked about people getting on the voter rolls as noncitizens, it was a laugh line. In 2025, people who say it doesn’t happen — that’s the laugh line,” he said. “Everybody knows it’s happening; it’s only a question of how bad and what are we going to do about it.”
He hailed the Trump administration for taking the issue seriously and for breaking down the silos that kept information compartmentalized, preventing anyone from connecting pieces of data.
The few cases that were brought usually came out of serendipity. For example, someone investigated for other crimes, often involving identity theft, might be found to be voting under a bogus identity.
The Trump administration has put DOGE and its data-crunching capabilities on the case and issued orders to the Homeland Security Department to make its databases available to those looking to check voters’ identities.
“Data is being mined, developed. That never in the past had been attempted,” Mr. Adams said.
Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, said the DOGE actions are worrying.
“There’s a concern about the role that DOGE is playing in accessing sensitive information and who’s accessing it,” he told The Washington Times.
He said state-level voting data can be a problem, as several states found out last year while purging their rolls of noncitizens.
A federal judge ordered Alabama to restore 3,200 names after it became clear that the state had purged naturalized citizens and some native-born citizens.
Mr. Noureldin saw the Justice Department’s string of new cases as a messaging statement to boost support for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The legislation would require proof of citizenship from those registering to vote in national elections.
He said the bill could create hurdles for millions of Americans who don’t have adequate documents, including people who have changed their names after marriage. He said that’s a tough price to pay for the small number of cases of illegal voting.
“I don’t think five cases is evidence of a systemswide problem,” he said.
The new cases charged include Svitlana and Yelyzaveta Demydenko, the Ukrainian mother and daughter who are legal permanent residents but not citizens.
Authorities said they registered online last summer in Florida and cast early ballots in person on Oct. 31. Investigators who spoke with the women said the daughter justified her ballot by saying she “wanted to make a difference.” The mother said she voted “to support the country.”
In New York, Akeel Abdul Jamiel, the Iraqi in Saratoga County, was charged with voting by an alien after casting a ballot in the 2020 elections. A Homeland Security official called Mr. Jamiel’s behavior “an insult to the democratic process.”
In Maryland, the Colombian living under a fraudulent identity for nearly 40 years was charged with illegally voting in two elections and collecting Social Security benefits. Prosecutors said Jorge Echeverri had been deported three times in the 1970s and 1980s before sneaking back into the U.S. and using a bogus Puerto Rican birth certificate to establish himself under a new identity.
In the newest case, brought last week, federal prosecutors in Florida charged Jacqueline Dianne Wallace, a Jamaican, with making a false claim of citizenship to vote last year.
She entered on a six-month visitor’s visa in 2010 but never left, making her presence in the U.S. illegal, authorities said. She applied for permanent legal status, a green card, in 2023 but has not been approved. A green card wouldn’t permit her to vote anyway.
A Homeland Security Investigations agent said in court documents that Ms. Wallace registered to vote online and wrongly claimed to be a U.S. citizen.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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