Trump's DOJ focuses in on voter fraud, with a murky assist from DOGE

Last October, at a library in Boynton Beach, Fla., Yelyzaveta Demydenko went with her mom and stepdad to vote for the first time.

Demydenko, who's 22, told a federal investigator that she voted in the presidential election "because she wanted to make a difference." Her mother, Svitlana, also voting for the first time, said she cast a ballot "because she wanted to support the country."

The women, who were born in Ukraine, are green card holders, not U.S. citizens, as is required to vote in federal elections. They now represent two of the first illegal voting charges brought by the Justice Department under President Trump.

The same week, federal law enforcement also announced charges against an Iraqi man accused of casting a ballot in the 2020 election, and a Jamaican woman accused of illegally voting in last year's presidential primary in Florida.

The four cases were made public about a month after Trump signed an executive order that seeks to add new document checks to voter registration, and as Republicans in Congress and in legislatures across the country try to pass laws with similar restrictions.

Trump and his allies have for years pushed the false narrative that non-U.S. citizens are voting in large numbers in federal elections, but nothing in these initial charges points to any widespread conspiracy.

The charges also come as the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division turns its focus from its longtime mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans to enforcing the president's executive orders. And according to federal officials, at least some of the initial cases relate to work done by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, though the government has not disclosed many details on how the Elon Musk-led group was involved.

In the leadup to the 2024 election, Trump and his allies, including Musk, pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that the Biden administration allowed migrants to enter the country so they would illegally vote in an attempt to steal the election for Democrats.

"A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump said during last September's presidential debate. "They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically."

No evidence ever came to light to support those allegations. And at least for the four people charged in recent weeks, available public records paint a much different picture.

Records suggest the Iraqi man, Akeel Abdul Jamiel, had lived in the U.S. for more than a decade before allegedly voting illegally, and letters he appears to have submitted in other court cases show he was a fan of Trump and that he was worried about immigration.

"I pray and hope that illegal immigration be stopped completely," Jamiel wrote in a letter to the Trump White House in 2019. In a separate document he wrote, "May god bless my favorite President Mr. Donald J Trump the greatest man of our times."

The charging document for Jacqueline Wallace, the Jamaican woman who was arrested, indicates she has been in the country for more than 14 years.

The Ukrainian mother and daughter, who entered the country legally on visas, were given permanent legal residence in the U.S. more than a year prior to voting, and told a federal investigator they didn't know they weren't also allowed to vote.

That's extremely common among these cases, said University of Idaho law professor Benji Cover, who wrote a paper about people, including noncitizens, misunderstanding election rules and being prosecuted in recent decades.

"We don't use the phrase 'voter mistake.' And I found in my research that a lot of these cases that are described as voter fraud seem to involve mistakes rather than fraud," Cover said. "There's a huge mismatch between the language we're using in our political rhetoric and the reality on the ground."

In a statement, White House spokesperson Liz Huston said: "Non-citizen voting is a very real problem, and anyone who says otherwise is delusional and lying." The White House also sent a list of noncitizen voting cases stretching back to 2011 that amount to roughly 30 people charged.

In other isolated cases this year, noncitizens have been charged with illegal voting in addition to other forms of identity fraud. A handful of such cases were also federally prosecuted during the Biden administration. But generally, Cover noted that it doesn't make sense for an immigrant without legal status to risk prison, deportation and family separation to cast one ballot — especially because the inherent paper trail of voting makes it very easy to get caught.

"It's a very strange crime because you actually go to the government to commit the crime and you write your name down on a piece of paper when you commit the crime," Cover said. "That always struck me as unlikely."

States are also beginning to quantify the noncitizen voting issue themselves — adding to the evidence that it rarely occurs.

Michigan recently released the results of a 2024 election audit that found 15 potential noncitizen votes out of the state's more than 5.7 million cast. A similar audit last year in Georgia uncovered 20 potential noncitizens out of the state's 8.2 million registered voters. Iowa says it found 35 potential noncitizen votes out of the state's nearly 1.7 million votes in 2024.

Still, some Republicans are pointing to the recent criminal cases as evidence of a systemic flaw that requires a comprehensive solution, like requiring all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport or other citizenship document to register to vote. Research shows such a change would pose a barrier for as many as 1-in-10 American voters.

Trump's March 25 executive order called for adding a requirement to the national voter registration form to show proof of citizenship, but a federal judge paused that effort after finding the president did not have the authority to make that change.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives also passed a version of such restrictions in March, called the SAVE Act, which is now at the Senate for consideration.

"The thing that never happens keeps happening," GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah wrote in response to news about the Demydenkos' charges. "American elections are for Americans only. Pass the SAVE Act NOW!"

In half of all states as well, legislatures have introduced some sort of proof-of-citizenship legislation in 2025, according to tracking by the Voting Rights Lab, with New Hampshire, Wyoming and Louisiana already having passed some form of those restrictions.

Arizona and Kansas were the first states to enact such laws and controversy followed. Kansas' law is no longer in effect after a federal court found it unconstitutional and evidence surfaced that tens of thousands of eligible citizens were blocked from voting.

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Cover, of the University of Idaho, says he worries isolated illegal voting arrests will be conflated into a bigger national crisis that justifies such restrictions.

"There may be ways to improve the voter registration process [so this never happens]. That's a legitimate policy goal," Cover said. "But when you start with this very heated political rhetoric and this false premise there's this massive widespread voter fraud, that suggests a very different set of solutions that involves making it much, much harder for everybody to register and much, much harder for everybody to vote."

Justice Department press releases, and the head of the Department of Homeland Security, credit DOGE with assisting with the investigations into Jamiel and the Demydenkos, but it is not clear what role DOGE played, or whether DOGE also assisted with the arrest of Wallace.

NPR requested more information on DOGE's involvement in the cases but did not receive more details from the White House, DOJ or DHS.

The case against the Demydenkos was already underway in December, before Trump's inauguration, according to a statement from the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, and so far there is no mention of DOGE in any court documents.

But those involved with DOGE have publicly mentioned election crimes work.

At a rally in Wisconsin at the end of March, Musk and associate Antonio Gracias, a DOGE staffer assigned to the Social Security Administration, revealed that DOGE was comparing Social Security data with state voter data in an effort to identify potential noncitizens who had illegally voted. Gracias said his team had referred cases of noncitizens voting to DHS' Homeland Security Investigations arm.

Earlier that same week, Trump's executive order instructed DHS to work with DOGE on voter list maintenance efforts. The next day, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent requested Jamiel's voter record from local election officials in New York, according to an email acquired by NPR through a public records request.

It's unclear how many potential noncitizen voters DOGE has uncovered.

Gracias told Fox News in early April that his team had found "thousands" of potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in a handful of states. But at the end of April, Musk and Gracias cited a smaller number — 57 — when they mentioned to reporters how many potential noncitizen voter fraud cases DOGE had referred so far to law enforcement, according to ABC News.

Elections administrators note this sort of records matching is notoriously arduous and can lead to huge initial numbers of potential noncitizens that get whittled down once investigators dig in, eliminate false positives, and find up-to-date citizenship information on people who have naturalized.

In Ohio last year, for instance, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose referred more than 600 potential noncitizen voters from the previous decade for prosecution. The state's attorney general ended up announcing fewer than 10 indictments, and of those, the Associated Press found some who illegally voted had done so without understanding they were ineligible.

Maybe the most high profile noncitizen voting incident last election cycle occured in Michigan, when a 19-year-old Chinese college student voted in Ann Arbor, then attempted to get his ballot back after it had already been counted. He now faces two state felony charges.

The incident put Michigan in the spotlight on the issue, so after voting was completed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, sought to put hard numbers to all the accusations and theories flying around.

"I think we all can agree that only U.S. citizens should be voting in American elections," Benson, who's also running for governor, told NPR in an interview. "And as the rhetoric around noncitizens having the ability to vote in our elections is increasing, I thought it was really important for us to just have a sense of the real raw numbers and data."

Her office compared the state's voter file to data they had on file with the state's department of motor vehicles and checked any matches against available federal citizenship data. Benson said she modeled the audit after the one Georgia election officials completed last year.

The Michigan audit revealed 15 potential noncitizens, in addition to the Chinese student, who seem to have successfully voted in 2024, and Benson's office turned those cases over to law enforcement for investigation.

When asked by NPR why she didn't have her office complete the review before the election, to prevent any improper votes, Benson said the state was implementing early voting for the first time in a presidential election — something that would impact every one of the state's more than 7 million registered voters — and there was only so much effort she felt the state's local election administrators could put toward something she knew wasn't occurring in large numbers.

Benson is backing a bill in Michigan's legislature to permanently codify some citizenship checks on the back end of the state's registration system. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers and advocacy groups are trying to put at least one proof-of-citizenship initiative on the 2026 ballot.

Benson is opposed to adding new burdens to the front end of registration for millions of voters.

"We want to have no evidence of people who aren't eligible voting in our elections," Benson said. "But this is a serious issue and it has to be addressed with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer."

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