Federal prosecutors keep charging noncitizens with illegal voting across multiple states, even as Democratic leaders dismiss the problem as a myth that “just doesn’t happen.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced indictments this week against 10 foreign nationals accused of voter fraud in Minnesota, including conduct tied to August’s primary. The Minnesota cases land on top of fresh charges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, part of a string of election-related arrests federal authorities have made in recent weeks.
Fox News reported the cases as the partisan fight over the SAVE Act intensifies. That bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Democrats call the measure unnecessary. The charging documents keep arriving anyway.
Blanche said election integrity should not be a “partisan concept.” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis put the stakes more directly.
Bis told Fox News Digital:
"Despite the media and Democrats denying it for decades, noncitizens continue to register and vote in federal elections."
She added: “Only Americans should be electing America’s leaders.”
Democratic leaders have spent months arguing the opposite. Their line is consistent: noncitizen voting is either nonexistent or so rare it barely registers.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., who represents Delaware County and part of Philadelphia, voted no on the SAVE Act in 2025 and left little room for doubt.
Scanlon said:
"Let me be perfectly clear: This is a non-issue. Noncitizens do not vote in U.S. elections."
That claim sits uneasily next to the three noncitizens arrested this month in Philadelphia County on election-related charges, in territory she partly represents.
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., reaffirmed his position Wednesday when Fox News Digital asked about the latest arrests. He said noncitizen voting is “already illegal and every legitimate study shows it is extremely rare, despite Donald Trump’s claim to the contrary.”
Padilla went further:
"The Department of Justice’s arrest of a dozen people after investigating millions of the 174 million registered voters in America confirms that."
He labeled the announcement of 12 arrests a “desperate attempt by Republicans to distract from their record of rising costs, chaos, and corruption that are hurting the American people.” He has also branded the SAVE Act “anti-voter” and accused Trump of trying to “scapegoat immigrants.”
Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Virginia Democrat, struck the same note last month on MS NOW.
Walkinshaw said:
"It is so rare that it's almost impossible to measure. It just doesn’t happen."
He suggested Trump was trying to resurrect the “Big Lie” and was “whining about the fact that he lost the 2020 election.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in March that “noncitizens do not vote in American elections.” Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., called the SAVE Act “extremely dangerous” and “voter suppression.”
The cases are not abstract. Federal authorities have put names, countries of origin, and specific election cycles on the record.
In Pennsylvania, Cliff Sanon, described as a Haitian illegal immigrant, was charged with submitting a fraudulent voter registration application ahead of the 2026 Pennsylvania primary. Joshua Kofi Edzie of Ghana was arrested on noncitizen voting-related charges. Sade Guppy, a Trinidad and Tobago national, allegedly voted illegally in the 2022 midterms.
DHS pointed Fox News Digital to Mahady Sacko, a Mauritanian illegal immigrant accused of voting in seven federal elections since 2008. That is not a one-off paperwork error. That is a pattern spanning multiple presidential and midterm cycles.
Three New Jersey residents, with origins in Jamaica, Venezuela, and Senegal, were charged this month with illegally voting and making false statements on citizenship applications. Across the broader set of cases, countries of origin also include Brazil, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, and Canada.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency could not comment on active investigations but remains committed to “rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”
New Jersey offers the clearest statewide snapshot. Over the summer, Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed that roughly 400 noncitizens had voted in the state while resisting calls for additional federal scrutiny.
A related account highlighted a “software glitch” that left about 6,600 noncitizens registered to vote in New Jersey, with hundreds actually casting ballots. Those figures do not match the claim that the problem is imaginary. They match a system that failed to keep noncitizens off the rolls until after the damage was done.
Congressman Chip Roy has used the New Jersey episode to press urgency for citizenship-proof requirements. The SAVE Act would force applicants to show they are citizens before they are added to federal voter rolls, a basic safeguard Democrats treat as an attack on democracy itself.
The SAVE Act is the legislative answer to the charging pattern. It would require proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. Republicans frame it as common sense. Democrats frame it as suppression.
Padilla’s math is revealing. He treats a dozen arrests drawn from a pool of 174 million registered voters as proof the problem is tiny. That framing ignores how hard these cases are to find, how often they depend on tips or data mismatches, and how many jurisdictions never run aggressive checks in the first place. Arrest totals measure enforcement, not the full universe of illegal ballots.
Scanlon’s district-level reality is harder to spin. Three noncitizen arrests in Philadelphia County this month landed after she called the entire subject a “non-issue.” Walkinshaw said it “just doesn’t happen.” Federal prosecutors keep filing charges that say otherwise.
Public support is not ambiguous. A voter ID measure drew backing from 80% of Americans in the related debate. Voters understand a simple rule: only citizens should choose the country’s leaders. Elected Democrats keep arguing that insisting on that rule is the real threat.
The Justice Department has also pointed to charges and guilty pleas involving 12 individuals in election-related cases. Blanche’s Minnesota announcement alone covered 10 foreign nationals. Pennsylvania and New Jersey added more. The defendants are not theoretical. They are named people accused of registering illegally, voting illegally, or lying about citizenship status on official forms.
Democratic messaging has not shifted with the docket. The same officials who said noncitizens do not vote are still saying it after Minnesota, after Philadelphia County, and after New Jersey’s own disclosure of hundreds of noncitizen ballots. The gap between the rhetoric and the arrests is the story.
If noncitizen voting “just doesn’t happen,” federal prosecutors are wasting a lot of time charging people for a crime that supposedly does not exist. The cases say the denial was the real non-issue all along.
