Two Convictions. A Guilty Plea. Two Pending Indictments. The Noncitizen-Voting Docket an Op-Ed Said Didn’t Exist.
A Washington Examiner op-ed argued this month that America has a real, decade-long noncitizen-voter-roll problem — while conceding it had no specific case to point to. It didn’t need to look far. The Justice Department’s own docket already has five names on it: two convictions, a guilty plea, and two pending indictments. State audits in Georgia, Texas, and Utah add a smaller, more precisely measured layer. And the federal fix for all of it — the SAVE Act — sits stalled in the Senate at 48-50, twice, with zero Democratic votes either time.
The most recent trigger for renewed attention was New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission, where Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) disclosed on July 21 that a software error had registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote — a story Civic Intelligence covered in depth when it broke. What follows here is the broader national record that story is one entry in.
- 5 named federal defendants in noncitizen-voting cases — two convicted, one pleaded guilty, two charged and presumed innocent — DOJ press releases
- 77 documented instances of noncitizen voting nationwide, 1999-2023, per Heritage Foundation's own fraud database — Heritage Foundation
- 48-50 the SAVE Act's vote margin in the Senate, twice, both times short of the 60 needed — Senate roll call
New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission contracts identity-verification and license-issuance technology to IDEMIA, the France-based firm that also runs driver-license systems in dozens of other states. Under New Jersey’s automatic voter-registration process — triggered whenever a resident gets a license or state ID at an MVC counter — roughly 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024, with fewer than 400 believed to have cast a ballot before anyone caught it. The two sides dispute whose failure it was: the state’s account says IDEMIA’s system misread noncitizens’ documents, including green cards and work visas, as citizenship proof; IDEMIA disputes that framing, saying applicants correctly told the system they weren’t citizens but the state’s own process registered them anyway — a validation failure on New Jersey’s end, not a document-misreading error on the vendor’s.
The number is not settled, and Sherrill’s administration has been careful not to pretend it is. As of July 28, the MVC is removing 4,500 of the flagged names from the rolls outright while sending the remaining 2,100 to county election officials for individual review — because, per the same day’s Inquirer follow-up, a meaningful share of those 2,100 could turn out to be citizens the software wrongly caught in the first place. Sherrill’s office also says it has found no evidence the flawed registrations changed the outcome of any election.
Start with the indictments. Federal prosecutors in New York’s Northern District charged Akeel Abdul Jamiel, a 45-year-old Iraqi national, with voting as an alien in Saratoga County’s 2020 election. In Florida, a Tampa federal grand jury indicted Dmitry Shushlebin, a Russian national, and Sanjar Jamilov, an Uzbek national, on a conspiracy to file 132 fraudulent voter registrations in Pinellas County. Jamiel, Shushlebin, and Jamilov have been charged, not convicted, and are presumed innocent unless a jury finds otherwise.
Two other cases have already ended. Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez, a 59-year-old Colombian national, was convicted of fraudulently voting in the 2024 presidential election on top of roughly $400,000 in stolen federal benefits — Section 8 housing assistance, Social Security disability payments, and food assistance — collected under a false identity. In Kansas, Jose Ceballos-Armendariz, the former mayor of Coldwater, pleaded guilty in 2026 to voter fraud and unlawfully holding public office. Those two are adjudicated, not alleged.
A fifth case is thinner on documentation but has circulated widely: Haoxiang Gao, a 19-year-old University of Michigan student and Chinese national, was reported charged over illegal registration and voting in the 2024 election before returning to China. No Justice Department release on Gao’s case could be independently verified for this story, so it is included here as reported, not as a confirmed federal charge.
State audits add a second, smaller layer — and a useful reality check. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) has run the most aggressive version: a 2022 pass flagged 1,634 attempted registrations from noncitizens, with zero confirmed votes among them, and an October 2024 audit of Georgia’s 8.2 million registered voters found 20 noncitizens on the rolls — nine of whom had voted, mostly in elections that predated the state’s 2012 citizenship-verification system.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson (R) ran the state’s voter list against the federal SAVE database and flagged 2,724 of more than 18 million registered voters as potential noncitizens, referring 33 to Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for review tied to the 2024 general election. Nelson herself flagged the tool’s limits in an April 2026 letter to federal immigration officials — and the caveat proved warranted: ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and Votebeat found county-level reviews turning up citizens wrongly caught by the match, including 3 of 9 flagged voters in Potter County and 11 of 97 in Travis County who had citizenship proof on file all along. Automated citizenship-matching has a real error rate in both directions, and Texas’s own numbers show it.
Utah ran the most exhaustive version: a roughly 14-month, $250,000 review of the state’s more than 2 million registered voters confirmed 27 noncitizens on the rolls, none shown to have voted.
Set all of it against the documented national record and the gap is stark. The Heritage Foundation — not an organization inclined to undersell the problem — maintains its own public Election Fraud Database and counts 77 documented instances of noncitizen voting nationwide from 1999 through 2023 (independent reviewers of the same database have put the figure closer to 40–70, depending on how narrowly “documented” is defined). New Jersey’s single-state, one-year software failure alone produced a flagged number dozens of times larger than a quarter-century of that national count. Read plainly, that says less about a hidden national wave of illegal votes and more about how badly one vendor’s coding error can distort the picture when it happens.
Congress has a bill that targets exactly the failure New Jersey just lived through. The SAVE Act, H.R. 22, sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), would require documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration nationwide — the kind of check that, run at the counter instead of left to a vendor’s software, might have caught what IDEMIA’s system missed. It passed the House 220-208 on April 10, 2025, with four Democrats — Reps. Ed Case (D-HI), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Jared Golden (D-ME), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) — crossing over to vote yes. An expanded version, the SAVE America Act, passed the House again 218-213 on February 11, 2026.
The Senate is where it stops. Sens. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have twice attached the measure to reconciliation vehicles in 2026, and both attempts failed 48-50 — short of the 60 votes a standard bill needs, with zero Senate Democrats voting yes either time. Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) and Associate Deputy Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (R) sent a 50-state warning letter on noncitizen voting earlier this year. It hasn’t moved a single vote.
Sherrill hasn’t taken a public position on the SAVE Act. But the irony sits close to home: the federal proof-of-citizenship requirement Senate Democrats have blocked twice this year is the exact kind of documentation check her own state’s motor-vehicle software failed to run correctly for a full year.
An op-ed said there was no specific case. Federal prosecutors have named defendants from Iraq, Russia, Uzbekistan, Colombia, and Kansas — two convictions, one guilty plea, two pending indictments, all presumed innocent unless proven otherwise. State audits in Georgia, Texas, and Utah found smaller, real numbers, with real error rates cutting in both directions. New Jersey’s own software failure — still being sorted out, one county at a time — produced a flagged number dozens of times larger than a quarter-century of the documented national count. And the federal fix for all of it sits stalled in the Senate at 48-50, twice, with zero Democratic votes either time.
