Federal prosecutors are accusing 18 immigrants of voting illegally in North Carolina during past elections—charges that come less than a month after they announced similar charges for a dozen others.
Thursday’s announcement comes as the U.S. Justice Department prepares to send federal election monitors to Wake, Alamance and Mecklenburg counties for Tuesday’s elections, prompting state election officials to clarify where those monitors will be allowed to observe voting.
“Every unlawful ballot silences the voice of a lawful voter, striking at the core of our great nation,” Ellis Boyle, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, said in a statement.
President Donald Trump and federal prosecutors are placing an increased emphasis on voting investigations in his second term. Democrats are favored to flip seats in Congress during this year’s midterm elections, and Trump has in the past launched allegations of voter fraud to claim that elections Democrats won were stolen.
One of the people charged earlier this month, 71-year-old Robert Corbett, told WRAL immediately after his initial court date that he had voted for Trump and thought that he was a U.S. citizen. Prosecutors allege he’s Canadian.
The charges against Corbett and others were all from the Eastern District, which stretches from Wake County to the coast. The new charges on Thursday were spread across the state: Nine in the Eastern District, five in the Middle District and four in the Western District. Prosecutors allege the defendants illegally registered to vote or cast ballots in previous elections, including the 2024 presidential election.
Hilary Harris Klein, a prominent North Carolina voting rights attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, questioned why elections officials are focusing more on the 30 cases of alleged fraud than on the thousands of ballots from legitimate voters that, she said, are likely to be tossed out due to stricter new rules on mail-in voting and voter identification.
“We have much bigger problems with our elections than non-citizen voting,” she said. “Not that they shouldn’t be doing the due diligence, and … the very small number shows a success in addressing those issues. By contrast, we have thousands of ballots from eligible voters, tossed.”
Federal prosecutors made the charging decisions in the voter fraud cases based on information from state elections officials. Sam Hayes, who leads the State Board of Elections, told WRAL in an interview Thursday that the investigation was delayed due to litigation over the use of a federal database to cross-check voter records and citizenship records. Critics said it would lead to false positives and cause American citizens to be accidentally and wrongfully accused of immigrant voter fraud, but the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the use of the database.
Hayes said state officials used the database to flag potential immigrant voters, but also did additional work to ensure they weren’t making mistakes. “We had to do our own analysis, and that took some time,” he said. “This is not all neatly packaged when you get it. There are several buckets of information. And, we were also waiting for some litigation to play out surrounding the use of the SAVE database for voter list maintenance purposes. And having gotten that Supreme Court order recently, we decided to move ahead.”
Hayes added that the state sent more names to the FBI than the 30 who have been charged so far. So it’s possible more charges are yet to come. He declined to say how many. However, earlier this year the state also sent letters to approximately 1,300 voters who had been flagged by that database as possibly being noncitizens.
Most people who register to vote in North Carolina do so at the DMV when they get their driver’s license. While noncitizens can get driver’s licenses, they’re not legally allowed to vote. Hayes added that for some of the potential noncitizens on the voter lists, it’s possible they didn’t try to break the law and were simply put on by mistake by DMV officials.
Hayes added that DMV Commissioner Paul Tine “has been a terrific partner in all of this.” And so far, the criminal charges have focused almost entirely on alleged immigrants who actually voted, not just those who were registered to vote.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said Thursday the prosecutions are intended to protect election integrity. “We need to preserve the integrity of the ballot box by ensuring only those eligible are casting ballots,” McCotter said in a statement.
The charges carry maximum penalties ranging from one to five years in prison, depending on the offense, provided the defendants are found to be guilty.
Many of the Trump administration’s efforts are being challenged in court from plaintiffs who argue that the government is undergoing an unprecedented campaign to interfere with states’ duties to administer elections.
Democratic Party leaders sued on Oct. 20 in federal court seeking to prevent Trump from interfering with states’ administration of the election. They asked the court to bar the Republican president’s administration from removing legally registered voters from statewide voter registration lists or preventing states from issuing ballots to registered voters or counting ballots. The lawsuit cites recent actions in California, where the Justice Department sued to block state election officials from counting mail ballots cast by people whom the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.
A federal judge on Wednesday sided with California in the case, a ruling the Justice Department immediately appealed. Another federal judge in Washington ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to identify all states where it has pressured officials to comply with its efforts to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in the midterm election, inquiries that Democrats have challenged as an illegal power grab.
Charges such as the ones in Raleigh Thursday could help administration attorneys build their broader case that people who aren’t U.S. citizens have or will illegally cast midterm votes — even though the Justice Department’s own investigations have shown that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.
Federal observers head to NC
The charges announced Thursday come amid increased federal attention on elections in North Carolina and other states during the 2026 midterms.
The Trump administration’s goal is to dispatch 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states on Election Day. That would more than double the number of federal monitors deployed during the 2022 midterms, when the DOJ under President Joe Biden sent out 388 people to polling places, Boyle said.
A sprawling election protection effort on the left is expected to counter Trump’s effort. Liberal groups are expected to deploy tens of thousands of monitors across the nation to counter largest-ever monitoring program by the Justice Department and other observers from Republican-aligned groups.
Klein, the voting rights attorney, questioned whether the fraud indictments, timed to coincide with that announcement of the poll observers, was intended to potentially intimidate voters.
“They could have raised these issues well before the election,” she said. “And waiting until early voting has started? It really creates an environment of fear around elections — when we should be creating environment of encouraging voters.”
Administration officials have said they have no plans to deploy immigration agents or troops to polling sites, the Associated Press reported. Justice Department officials have said their monitors won’t be armed and will not interfere with voting. Asked about department monitors being sent to Georgia, Trump told a reporter recently: “They’re not going to do anything other than watch.”
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis blamed “radical Democrats” for creating fears about election security. “President Trump has done more than any other president to ensure we have free and fair elections,” Bis said.
Hayes said the timing has more to do with legal challenges than anything else. He said his office began looking into this months ago, in April, but was delayed due to lawsuits challenging the legality of using the SAVE database. He also said he expected that the vast majority of voters would have no idea the federal poll observers are there at all.
In an Oct. 20 email obtained by WRAL, the U.S. Justice Department notified Alamance County election officials that federal monitors would observe compliance with voting rights laws, including protections for voters with disabilities and access to the ballot.
“As the Civil Rights Division has done in the past, our monitors only observe,” the email stated. “They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process.”
Tim Hoegemeyer, a top lawyer for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told county election directors that the federal monitors are allowed to be near the polling places but not inside where voting is happening. “The USDOJ observers are not permitted under state law to be inside the voting enclosure during the day while voting is going on,” he wrote in an email obtained by WRAL.
Under guidance provided to counties, federal monitors may observe from outside polling place buffer zones, which is between 25 to 50 feet from the polling place, speak with voters and attend public election board meetings. They may also observe polling place opening and closing procedures, but cannot enter voting enclosures while voters are casting ballots.
Wake County election officials confirmed they were notified of the monitoring plans but said they don’t know how many federal monitors will arrive or which polling places they will visit.
“We welcome them to Wake County to see the great work of our election teams and hear directly from voters outside the buffer zone,” said Riley Chater, public records coordinator for the Wake County Board of Elections, adding that they anticipate no noticeable impact on voters or precinct workers.
WRAL state government reporters Will Doran and Caroline Yaffa contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed.