At 4:09 p.m. Eastern on Monday, Nov 2, the day before the midterm, Attorney General Todd Blanche's Justice Department announced charges against 63 people for election-related crimes. Blanche called it "the largest surge of voter-fraud arrests since President Trump returned to office."
BTP counted the list. DOJ describes 58 of the 63 defendants (92.06 percent) as lawful permanent residents. It describes four as illegal aliens. One, Robert Glenn Johnson of Annapolis, Maryland, is charged over a New Mexico registration and is not described as an alien at all. The release's headline line says "including four illegal aliens" and never totals the green-card holders.
The release lists names and ages, running up to 74; 14 of the lawful permanent residents on it are 60 or older. It embeds 14 photos, each captioned with a name and "a lawful permanent resident." Four of the image file names contain "Blur." BTP could not view the images and does not know whether faces are shown.
The reveal is in the earlier list. DOJ's Oct 26 release, headlined "48 aliens," repeats name for name all 28 California defendants DOJ had announced in its Oct 19 release: 13 from the Central District, 6 Eastern, 5 Northern, 4 Southern. Only 20 of the 48 were new. Across all three releases DOJ announced 139 defendants; the unique count is 111, and DOJ describes 105 of them (94.59 percent) as lawful permanent residents, 5 as illegal aliens and 1 as neither.
The Nov 2 release also says: "In the last nine weeks alone, the Department has charged 195 aliens across 25 states," and "Since the beginning of this Administration, we have charged 239 people." The nouns differ, so the share is approximate: about 82 percent of the cases came in the nine weeks before the vote. Whether those totals count the 28 Californians twice is not stated.
The charges are serious. DOJ alleges many defendants swore they were citizens on registration forms, and some allegedly lied again on naturalization forms. Voting by a noncitizen in a federal election carries up to one year in prison under 18 U.S.C. 611(b); DOJ says the false-statement and fraudulent-registration felonies carry up to five years. Section 611(c) gives a defense to a person whose parents are citizens, who lived in the US before age 16 and who reasonably believed they were a citizen. The releases do not say whether any defendant raises it. DOJ's releases state that all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The pace could reflect when investigations matured; DOJ's pages give no reason for the timing.
On Oct 19, DOJ said it had given California a list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants on Oct 13. It charged 28. When DOJ next totals its voter-fraud arrests, will those 28 count a third time, and how many of the 111 will end in a conviction?