Prosecutor: ‘Legitimacy of our elections’ a reason for charging 10 NC immigrants with voter fraud
By Randall Kerr and Will Doran
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NORTH CAROLINA (WRAL) — As thousands of North Carolinians went to the polls Thursday for the start of early voting in the 2026 midterms, state and federal officials held a press conference to announce charges of voter fraud against 10 people stemming from past election cycles.
All of them are accused of lying about their citizenship status to register to vote. Most of them were also charged with illegally casting a ballot in a federal election. The defendants. Nine of them are legal immigrants and permanent U.S. residents but not U.S. citizens, according to prosecutors.
“We either protect the sanctity of ‘one citizen, one vote’ or we allow the destruction and hollowing out of America by non-citizens,” U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle, the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of North Carolina, told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Raleigh Thursday. “It is wrong. It is antithetical to the law. And we will not tolerate it.”
Earlier in the day, eight of the defendants — wearing restraints in their hands and ankles — went before a federal judge, who read them their charges before releasing them without having to pay bond. Prosecutors said they weren’t considered a flight risk and therefore didn’t need to be detained.
None have yet indicated whether they plan to plead guilty or not guilty, and any trials would likely be months away if not longer. If convicted, they could be sentenced to years in prison.
The defendants include natives of Germany, Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, El Salvador and the now-defunct nation of Yugoslavia, prosecutors said. One is accused of being in the country illegally, in addition to having voted illegally.
The charges against them deal with years-old allegations, and the indictments were brought last week. When asked why their court hearings and the subsequent press conference weren’t held until the start of early voting on Thursday, Boyle indicated the timing was a coincidence, not politically motivated.
Two other people were charged with similar crimes earlier this year, bringing the total of pending voter fraud cases to 12. That’s less than 0.0002% of the state’s 7.9 million registered voters. But Boyle said it was important to highlight the work his office, as well as state elections officials, are doing on this — particularly for people who are losing faith in elections.
“Even one criminal act of illegal voting undermines the entire system,” Boyle said. “Because the legitimacy of our elections depend not only on the actual security of the system, but also on the confidence that our citizens have in it. Perception is reality. And citizens believe the process is riddled with fraud.”
President Donald Trump, who appointed Boyle to office, has repeatedly made disproven claims of voter fraud to call into question election results when he or his allies have lost in the past. In this year’s midterms, Democrats are expected to over-perform and flip a number of GOP-held seats, driven by voters’ frustration with foreign and domestic policies supported by Trump and other Republicans.
Results from a WRAL/WSOC News Poll this week found only 37% of likely voters approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, and that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper has a wide lead over Republican candidate Michael Whatley.
The same poll also found that 85% of North Carolina likely voters expressed confidence their votes would be counted accurately this year.
Boyle was joined at the press conference by State Elections Director Sam Hayes, also a Republican political appointee, who praised Trump for putting together a database of Social Security numbers that Hayes said helped identify those who were in court Thursday.
“The State Board of Elections decided to avail ourselves off of the SAVE database in partnership with Homeland Security,” Hayes said. “We ran our voter rolls through the SAVE database back in April. That produced the results.”
He noted that the elections board has also recently sent letters to roughly 1,400 more people who that database flagged as potentially being noncitizens. Some Democrats have criticized that database, saying it likely contains typos that will lead to legitimate voters being disenfranchised or even criminally charged.
“The analysis of the SAVE database is that it contains regular errors,” Democratic Gov. Josh Stein told reporters at a separate event Thursday. “A high percentage of people who are in the database flagged as noncitizens are in fact citizens. And so, what you don’t want to do is to use a database to screen out people who are actually American.”
But many of the 10 newly charged with illegally voting are accused of having done so for years without detection, which Hayes and Boyle said highlights the need for tools allowing closer checks of the state’s voter rolls. Many of the accused have lived in the U.S. for decades.
One of them told WRAL after court Thursday that he always thought he was an American, and that he only just learned the government disagrees. Robert Corbett, 71, said that he was born in Canada but adopted at a very young age by an American mother and has lived in the U.S. most of his life.
“I voted like five or six times,” he said in an interview, adding that he voted for Trump in the most recent election. “It was never an issue because I thought I was a dual citizen.”
He added that these new charges have led him to places he never thought he’d go. “People were sleeping on the floors,” Corbett said of the night he spent in jail after his arrest. “I was lucky. I got to sleep in a chair. But the cells were absolutely filthy, people peeing on the floors.”
Corbett added: “I’m not happy about any of it. Maybe I need to call Donald Trump.”
Several of the other defendants declined to comment when approached after court Thursday. All were assigned a federal public defender, who also declined to comment, as is standard for that office’s work on any pending case.
Corbett was one of nine, including Lionel Paul, Karl Fout, Ludagardys Matthews, Edduard Sosa, James Herrmann, Mervin Bogle, Lawton McKenzie and Romana Abreu-Exia, who made their first appearance Thursday morning in federal court in Raleigh. Gijna MacDonald was scheduled to appear in federal court in New Bern.
In Raleigh, the defendants were shackled around the ankles, wrists and waist and escorted into the courtroom under guard. But at least eight of them were quickly released from custody Thursday without being required to post bail. It wasn’t immediately clear how MacDonald’s and Sosa’s cases were resolved. Sosa is the defendant prosecutors say is in the country illegally.
Prosecutors said many of the defendants have lived in the U.S. for over a decade, including some for over 60 years, and cited those deep roots to explain a lack of concern that they would flee.
All are charged with lying about their citizenship in order to illegally register to vote. Prosecutors allege that most of them also illegally cast a vote in at least one federal election. Some have voted in multiple elections, dating back years, prosecutors allege.
WRAL reporters Caroline Yaffa and Shaun Gallagher contributed to this article.
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