AKRON, Ohio — Before November’s presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into possible voter fraud, including people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.
It coincided with A national Republican messaging strategy warning that possibly thousands ineligible voters would vote.
“The right to vote is sacrosanct,” Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said in a statement at the time. “If you are not a U.S. citizen, it is illegal to vote – whether you thought you were allowed to or not. You will be held accountable.”
Ultimately, their efforts led to only a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal referrals for voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors charged nine people for voting as noncitizens over a decade — and one was later found to have died. That total is a small fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and the tens of millions of ballots cast during that period.
The outcome and the stories of some of those now charged illustrate the gap – both in Ohio and the United States – between the rhetoric about non-citizen voting and the reality: it is rarewill be arrested and prosecuted if it does happen does not occur as part of a coordinated plan to organize elections.
The Associated Press has attended in-person and virtual hearings for three of the Ohio suspects over the past two weeks. Each case involved people with long ties to their communities who acted alone, often under the mistaken impression that they had the right to vote. They now face misdemeanor charges and possible deportation.
Among them is Nicholas Fontaine, a 32-year-old precision sheet metal worker from Akron. He was charged in October with illegal voting, a fourth-degree felony.
Fontaine is a Canadian-born permanent resident who moved to the US with his mother and sister when he was two years old. He faces possible prison time and deportation on allegations that he voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections.
He remembers being approached on the street as a student to register to vote.
“I think in my young teenage brain I thought, ‘Well, I should register for the draft, I should be able to vote,’” Fontaine said in an interview.
Permanent residents like Fontaine are just one of many categories of immigrants who must register for possible military service the Selective Service but who cannot legally vote.
Fontaine said he received a postcard from the local election board in 2016 with information about his polling place. He voted without any problems. He even showed his ID before receiving his ballot.
“No problems. I went in, voted, turned in my voter stuff, that was it,” he said. “There was no, ‘Hey, there’s a problem here,’ or, ‘There’s something here.’ Here is your ballot.”
Fontaine said a Department of Homeland Security official visited him at his home in 2018 or 2019, informed him that his votes in 2016 and 2018 were illegal and warned him not to vote again. He has never done that again since. That’s one reason why his indictment this fall came as a shock.
He said he never received notice that he had been charged and missed his court hearing in early December. He was only informed of the allegations when an AP reporter knocked on his door after the scheduled hearing and told him.
Fontaine said he grew up in a household where his American stepfather taught him the value of voting. He said he would never have deliberately cast an illegal vote.
“I don’t know of a single person, not even the Americans I’ve talked to about voting, who would consider voting illegally for any reason,” he said. “Like, why would you do that? There’s no point. They’re going to find out – it’s clear they’re going to find out. And it turns one vote into two. Even if you do, can you get a hundred? How many millions of voters are there in America?”
Faith Lyon, Portage County elections director, said local officials in the county where Fontaine is charged would not have had any way to independently verify his immigration status. Every voter registration form includes a checkbox that asks whether someone is a U.S. citizen or not, and explains that people can’t vote unless they are, she said.
In two other illegal voting cases before the Ohio courts, the defendants left that box unchecked, according to their lawyers, believing that leaving it out would result in the Board of Elections not registering them if they were indeed ineligible come. Yet they were registered anyway and are now facing criminal charges for their right to vote.
A day before Fontaine’s scheduled hearing, one of those defendants, 40-year-old Fiona Allen, cried outside a Cleveland courtroom as a public defender explained the charges she faced.
She had moved to the US from Jamaica nine years ago. After turning in her voter registration form and receiving her registration, Allen voted in 2020, 2022 and 2023, prosecutors say. The mother of two, including a son in the U.S. Navy, and her husband of 13 years, a naturalized citizen who is also a military member, declined to comment at the courthouse. Allen has pleaded not guilty.
Another, 78-year-old Lorinda Miller, appeared in court via Zoom last week. She seemed shocked at the charges.
Her attorney said Miller, who came to the U.S. from Canada as a child, is affiliated with an indigenous tribe that issued her papers identifying her as “a citizen of North America.” She was told this was enough to register and vote. She has even been called for jury duty, attorney Reid Yoder said.
He plans to take the case to trial after Miller pleads not guilty to the charges.
“I think the integrity of the vote needs to be protected with all our hearts,” Yoder said. “I think the purpose of the law is to punish people who have cheated the system. That’s not my client. To really cheat the system, you have to know you’re doing it. My client is not like that. She believes in the sanctity of the vote and that is why she participated. She didn’t know she was doing anything wrong.”
The Ohio cases are just one example of what is true nationally: the story of widespread numbers immigrants Registering to vote without the necessary legal documents and then voting is simply not supported by the facts, said Jay Young, senior director of the Voting and Democracy Program for Common Cause.
The state’s voter rolls are regularly cleaned, he said, and the penalties for casting an illegal vote as a noncitizen are severe: fines, the possibility of jail time and deportation.
He said the role of such immigrants and their potential to influence the election was “the most enduring false narrative we have seen in this election.” But he also said it served a purpose: to divide the country and sow distrust in the electoral system. .
“If your guy doesn’t win or you’re a candidate that doesn’t win, then you have an excuse that you can tell yourself to justify it,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.
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