DOJ Charges 16 Individuals for Election Crimes

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sept. 18 announced charges against 16 people across seven states, alleging various election-related crimes.

The individuals are being accused of “unlawful voting by non-citizens in federal elections, false claims of citizenship to register or vote, and related offenses including wire fraud, naturalization fraud, passport fraud, and unlawful firearm purchases,” the DOJ said in a statement.

Eight individuals, all of them immigrants, have been charged in Texas. This includes seven lawful permanent residents and an illegal immigrant.

The illegal immigrant, Moises Anwar Arellano‑Alba, 36, from Mexico, is facing two charges of allegedly making a false statement of citizenship in order to register to vote and voting by an alien in a federal election.

Under Title 18 of U.S. Code Section 611, it is unlawful for an immigrant to vote in any federal or mixed election to select candidates for the posts of president, vice president, member of the Senate, member of the House of Representatives, presidential elector, resident commissioner, or delegate from the District of Columbia. Meanwhile, Title 18 of U.S. Code Section 1015 criminalizes knowingly making false statements regarding citizenship in registering to vote or actually casting votes.

Other charged individuals are three Mexicans, two Nigerians, and one person each from Congo and India.

In Idaho, Avila Gomez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, allegedly claimed to be a U.S. citizen and voted in the May 2022 and November 2024 elections, according to the DOJ. In addition, Gomez is accused of procuring Idaho identification cards through fraud. Title 18 of the U.S. Code Section 1028 makes it a crime to knowingly produce an identification document without lawful authority. 

In Georgia, three people have been charged—an illegal immigrant and two suspected of being illegal immigrants. 

The illegal immigrant, Analiea Milliscent Eccles, 44, from Venezuela, allegedly voted nine times between 2008 and 2024, the DOJ said.

In Massachusetts, a lawful permanent resident who is a Nigerian national was apprehended and subsequently charged with voting illegally in the 2022 elections and allegedly casting votes in the 2024 general election.

In Wisconsin, a Colombian national and lawful permanent resident is being accused of falsely claiming to be an American citizen while registering to vote for the November 2022 federal elections. And in New Jersey and Michigan, one person each has been charged for election-related crimes.

The Epoch Times was unable to reach the legal representatives for Arellano‑Alba, Gomez, and Eccles.

In August, the Census Bureau released a report analyzing noncitizen voting in the November 2020 general election.

Out of almost 160 million voters who cast ballots in the election, the bureau “determined with high confidence that over 128 million of these voter records represented citizens, and that over 24,000 of these voter records represented noncitizens at the time of the election,” the report said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s push to further regulate mail-in voting is facing challenges.

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to enhance election integrity with regard to U.S. mail. The order called for the use of secure ballot envelope identifiers and other voter eligibility verification measures. The United States Postal Service issued a rule last month to implement the executive order.

On Sept. 4, a U.S. District Judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the USPS from implementing regulations tightening mail-in voting. The injunction applied to the Nov. 3 midterm elections and any other federal election prior to the date.

The Trump administration then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court to pause the injunction. On Sept. 14, the Supreme Court refused to lift the nationwide injunction, saying that the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the injunction.

Trump criticized the decision in a Sept. 15 post on Truth Social.

“Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally corrupt and out of control Mail-In voting ‘disaster,’ which is a laughing stock all over the World,” he wrote.