I am as concerned about voter fraud as the next person, so I was interested and worried about a press release from ICE headed "19 aliens charged with voter fraud in North Carolina following ICE investigation".
If ICE has the proof, every one of them should go to jail, as a minimum, be denied naturalization in the future (something at least one of the 19 had sought), and perhaps deported. So I read the release carefully and noticed the lists of aliens, one of which follows:
- Francisco Antonio-Aguirre, age 64, Guatemala
- Roob Kaur Atar-Singh, age 57, Malaysia
- Rosalva Negrete-Toledo, aka Rosalva Cortes, age 65, Mexico
- Dave Delano Virgil, age 57, Tobago [Trinidad and Tobago is the name of the nation]
- Eloy Alberto Zayas-Berrier, age 70, Cuba
- Emmanuel Olakunle Atoyebi, age 31, Nigeria
- Mokhtar Qaid Ahmed Gulaimid, age 48, Yemen
Bearing in mind that conspiracies to break the election law involving lots of people are more dangerous than some ad hoc violations by individuals, though each are equally illegal, and thinking about all the immigration scams that are typically worked out within a given ethnic group, I wondered: What do these people have in common?
Nationality is not one of them; the full set of 19 came from 16 different countries, with Mexico having three and China two.
All politics is local, as late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill informed us, so maybe the 19 were in a single jurisdiction and some political schemer persuaded them all, to vote — illegally — for candidate X. Maybe the organizer paid them to do so.
With that thought in mind I looked at the indictments of six of them, all in separate PACER document files. They all were charged with voting illegally in specific counties in the state, one in Caswell, two in Forsythe, one in Guilford, and two in Hoke. No shady political operative would have created that picture. (These findings were for the six of the seven noted above; I could not find a PACER file on Antonio-Aguirre.)
Unless there is some kind of secret cabal that pulls together Malaysians and Tobagonians and Yemenis it struck me that there was no conspiracy here. Each of these misguided aliens must have operated on his or her own. (Each of the indictments is for a single alien, and no other names appeared in the documents I examined.) One or more of those indicted may have a green card and unwittingly equated that with citizenship.
What I did find interesting is that all of them voted in the 2016 election, but they were not charged until a couple of months before this election.
The September 3, 2020, ICE press release includes a link to an ICE August 27, 2018, press release that come out, similarly, about two months before that year's midterm election, bearing this headline "19 foreign nationals indicted for voting illegally in 2016 elections".
That time, as this year, the 19 came from 16 nations; there were 14 singletons, three from Mexico, and then, in a small blow to symmetry, two from Haiti (not China as this year).
It almost sounds as if the U.S. Attorney's Office found 38 aliens voting illegally in the 2016 elections, and decided to indict half of them in 2018, just before that election, and the other half in 2020, just before the presidential election, with the six Mexicans divided into two parts for each set of indictments.
This may simply be coincidence, but it looks odd.
While the aliens voting illegally scheme seems to be without any plausible patterns the indictments and the press releases were cut from the identical cloth, with oddly, almost identical numbers.
Of the nine cases in the 2018 press release examined in detail on PACER, we found three dismissals and six guilty pleas, with a one-month jail sentence, two probations and (within this group of six) fines ranging from $100 to $600. All of which suggests differing levels of violations or, in three cases, the lack thereof, or the lack of adequate proof of violations.