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….
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….