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This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that 18 non-citizens had been charged with illegally voting in North Carolina, including three in New Hanover County. Over the course of the year, the DOJ has secured a total of 30 indictments for illegal voting across the state.
Ellis Boyle, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, framed the charges in stark, constitutional terms.
“Protecting the integrity of our elections is fundamental to preserving our constitutional republic,” he wrote in a press release. “Indeed, the right to vote is the primary seed from which all other rights and liberties sprout.”
On that note, I think most sane Americans would agree. There is a long history — at once tragic and inspiring — of Americans who have fought for the vote. The fight to correct the flaws and limitations of our founding documents, to right those wrongs in law and then in practice, gave the United States some of its most striking civil rights heroes. It has also left some Americans, in particular Black voters, with lingering concerns about voter disenfranchisement and suppression, through gerrymandering and the ever-shifting policies around voting. Occasionally those are exaggerated for partisan reasons, but many are demonstrably valid.
But Boyle, appointed by then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi last summer, did not leave things in the important but somewhat abstract constitutional realm.
“When noncitizens steal your vote, they can create an unamerican government that strips all liberty and freedom from citizens. Every unlawful ballot silences the voice of a lawful voter, striking at the core of our great nation. This is not a victimless crime; every citizen who casts a lawful vote is a victim. You do not know which citizen’s lawful vote that illegal vote cancelled out, so it cancels out every lawful vote,” Boyle wrote.
This is a common framing I’ve heard from those on the right when it comes to noncitizens voting, although Boyle’s particular language is especially dramatic.
The overarching dystopian threat of an ‘Un-American’ government that “strips all liberty and freedom from citizens” seems a little hard to reconcile with the relative infrequency with which noncitizens vote. The DOJ’s recent announcement that “more than 400 people who appear to be illegally registered to vote” out of Washington state's roughly five million registered voters, for example, doesn’t quite set the scene for a hostile takeover at the ballot box.
Many of those illegally registered voters, according to the DOJ, are permanent lawful residents with green cards. Did these people lie maliciously under oath to register, or did they misunderstand the law? You can guess which the DOJ is implying. But set aside motive, and look at the numbers: the math doesn’t math.
According to a database of documented voter fraud cases maintained by the Heritage Foundation — hardly a bastion of woke voting policies — there have been 1,620 documented cases of voter fraud nationwide between 1982 and 2025, including 100 incidents of noncitizens actually voting (not just registering). As the New York Times framed it, that’s 0.000008% of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections during that time period. As sleeper cells go, that’s a fairly small one.
Perhaps for that reason, the DOJ and others concerned about non-citizen voting will often say their findings are “the tip of the iceberg,” as acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd said in Washington. And maybe they are, but there’s a sizable gulf between claims and convictions.
Making his case based on the relatively low number of illegal voters, Boyle performs an interesting exercise in logic that takes the premise that an illegal non-citizen vote ‘cancels out’ a legal citizen’s vote to a hyperbolic conclusion. He argues that since we don’t know whose vote was cancelled — by this Schrödinger's ballot — then all legal votes are cancelled.
Obviously, this is not literally how voting math works, so one hopes Boyle is being figurative.
To his credit, Boyle is reaching for some kind of universalizing theme here. In President Trump’s telling, illegal voting is a partisan scheme orchestrated by Democrats. And, more generally, I’ve often heard the argument that non-citizens — whether here legally or not — are inherently likely to vote for Democrats because their policies on immigration are less restrictive (critics would say ‘weaker,’ advocates would say ‘more humane’). Boyle didn’t put a partisan spin on his efforts to magnify the importance of the issue.
Now, the DOJ’s high-profile efforts to crack down on illegal voting have been criticized as an attempt to amplify President Trump’s drumbeat of unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, seeding potential challenges to the 2026 election results. But while the barrage of press releases about illegal votes can keep Trump’s claims in the news cycle, it doesn’t make them any more true.
Still, Trump’s lies aside, there are valid reasons to police illegal voting. And, importantly, you don’t need to inflate the stakes to make a single vote count. As Attorney Russ Ferguson for the Western District of North Carolina noted, “In our most recent elections in North Carolina — the 2025 municipal elections — there were 14 races decided by 2 votes; 15 races decided by 1 vote; and 7 races that were tied [emphasis in original].” We’ve seen our fair share of close races here in the past — and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw at least one single-digit margin this year.
I often find myself, at least in principle, agreeing with some of my conservative friends and colleagues about the need for election security. I’m in total agreement with Boyle about the sacred and central role of the franchise. Where I part company with some on the right is on which lengths we’ll go to support it.
For example, I’ve been persuaded that voter ID is essentially a reasonable requirement. But I’ve also seen evidence that the way voter ID laws have been rolled out has led to a disproportionate decrease in the turnout of legally registered and eligible Black and Hispanic voters. You don’t have to impugn the law’s racial motivations to see its racial outcome. And if you prefer not to see it as a racial issue, there’s still, at day’s end, voters who didn’t vote. I am just as concerned for those silenced voices as I am about ballots cancelled by an illegal voter.
Likewise, for argument’s sake, let’s take the DOJ’s efforts to root out illegal voting as an important defense of our sacred constitutional rights and not a partisan performance. It’s still, no doubt, a considerable use of resources. You could say, ‘We’re talking about defending the franchise here, so let’s spare no expense.’ Very well. Why then the recent hemming and hawing over the budgets for early voting sites, and two different bills to cut the early-voting period to six days for both the primary and general election?
Setting aside this year’s record-breaking early voting turnout, if an extra site or an extra day allows just a handful of extra voters to exercise their right — is that not worth it? Is two Sundays’ worth of early voting too much? How much did it cost to run down those three illegal voters in New Hanover County?
I’ll say, it’s my sense that, this cycle, the New Hanover County Board of Elections has done a good, bipartisan job listening to the community when it comes to early voting. But I still hear grumblings about the cost. Conservatives often note how little early-voting turnout there is, how some sites sit empty all day.
And I get it, it’s taxpayer money, and officials have a duty to be good stewards of public dollars. But we’re not talking about staffing a fast-food chain; we’re talking about the franchise. If we were gonna spend a little extra on anything, you could do worse than “the primary seed from which all other rights and liberties sprout.”
