Trump’s team ratchets up ‘voter fraud’ arrests as president sows election doubts

Trump’s team ratchets up ‘voter fraud’ arrests as president sows election doubts A flood of cases targeting noncitizens appear to stem from isolated incidents and errors but could have serious consequences — including prison and deportation - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Already a member? Log in With a week to go before midterm Election Day and as early voting was kicking off across the country, Donald Trump’s administration announced more than 50 arrests alleging “illegal voting, fraudulent voter registration, and related election crimes.” Federal agencies are flooding social media with images and videos of agents in their official blue windbreakers handcuffing immigrants with blurred-out faces. The Department of Homeland Security promotes “ANOTHER VOTER FRAUD ARREST” almost daily with warnings that officers are “cracking down on election fraud and bringing those responsible to justice.” The Department of Justice has charged at least 180 people with illegally voting or registering to vote as noncitizens since the start of Trump’s second term, according to a recent analysis by The Washington Post. More than half of those cases were brought within the last two months. But none of the cases appear to show any evidence of a concerted effort among Democrats or other groups to “rig” or “steal” elections from Trump and his Republican allies, despite the president’s bogus, yearslong narrative that his political enemies are conspiring against him. Instead, the cases mostly appear to stem from individual, isolated incidents that resulted from apparent registration errors, or from people who never voted at all but wrongly ended up on voter rolls. On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement touted the arrest of 32-year-old Haitian immigrant Rolex Augustin, who was deported for tampering with a ballot box in Wisconsin. ICE shared a post on X from right-wing activist account Libs of Tik Tok, who quoted agency spokesperson Micah Bock as saying “illegal aliens such as Rolex, who tamper with elections, dilute the votes of American citizens.” But according to a criminal complaint, he didn’t “dilute” anything. Augustin was seen on security video approaching a ballot box, removing a security seal, then walking away. The box was secure, and officers never discovered any damage. Augustin, who is homeless, later said he wanted to get the attention of law enforcement so he could be arrested and sent back to Haiti. In March, federal prosecutors in Florida charged 60-year-old Haitian immigrant Wilner Renaud with four felony counts of making false statements in order to vote and one misdemeanor count of voting in 2022. Renaud, who was living in a homeless shelter at the time of his arrest, said he had completed a citizenship test and received a voter registration card that he believed gave him the right to cast a ballot. Last month, a jury acquitted Renaud on all charges. Khalwinder Singh Bhengura, an Indian immigrant who received his green card in 2022, was accused of registering to vote and casting a ballot in the November presidential election while living in Texas, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen. Federal prosecutors accused the 69-year-old grandfather of unlawfully registering to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he would have been able to do so. The judge overseeing his case also barred his attorney from making a “mistake-of-law” defense over his “claimed lack of knowledge” that voting as a noncitizen is illegal, according to court filings. He was also blocked from mentioning any “claimed hardships his conviction would place upon his family or third parties, or other evidence and arguments designed to appeal to the jury’s sympathy that are untethered to the elements of the offenses or any valid defenses.” On Tuesday, after a two-day trial jury convicted Bhengura on one count of voting by an alien in a federal election and another count of making a false claim of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. He faces up to five years in federal prison and fines of up to $350,000. And despite having a green card, ICE can now try to deport him. According to court filings, several other cases target green card holders who allegedly voted in elections but denied doing so when filling out paperwork or sitting for interviews to get their U.S. citizenship, making them vulnerable to arrest and removal from the country — another avenue for mass deportations in the president’s government-wide efforts to remove tens of thousands of people from the country. Mukeshkumar Somabhai Chaudhari said he mistakenly signed up to vote while completing a routing online registration form for his driver’s license. “I just clicked through it,” he told The Fillmore County Journal earlier this year. “That’s how I made the mistake.” Chaudhari, who is originally from India, was unsure whether he was eligible to vote but saw his name listed on voter rolls, he said. He said he made a mistake during his immigration proceedings, but he now faces one count of making a “false statement” to vote. “Sometimes the narrative gets ginned up that there are all these noncitizens who are part of a conspiracy to be registered as voters and would vote in a particular way,” Derek T. Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told The Washington Post. “That’s not what we’re seeing,” he said. “It’s not happening at scale, and it’s isolated incidents across the country with no clear partisan pattern.” Justice Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels disputed the idea that the cases merely involve “confused people who didn’t understand the rules.” “Many of these defendants falsely swore they were U.S. citizens to register, and many later lied under oath about it on their naturalization applications,” she told The Washington Post. The arrests dovetail with the Justice Department’s efforts to block ballots and freeze results in states where officials have accused thousands of noncitizens of illegally voting. This summer, following Trump’s primetime speech outlining what he called “shocking vulnerabilities in election infrastructure,” the administration claimed 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. That figure later came down to just 185. All of them were citizens. Federal law mandates a “quiet period” 90 days before an election to ensure voters aren’t wrongly disenfranchised without enough time to make corrections, but the administration sued California to force election officials to set aside the ballots of up to 20,000 people. Justice Department officials are now calling on Washington officials to hold back the ballots of more than 400 people. The efforts are among the latest attempts by the administration to use “shoddy, error-prone data to preemptively cast doubt” on election outcomes, according to Elizabeth Laird with the Center for Democracy & Technology. “This is a bad legal move based on bad data,” she said. “It’s a baseless attack on the integrity of our election system.” Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments [Image text:] EXERCISE YOUR RIGHT TOVOTE Make Your Heard