The GOP has stoked fears of non-citizens voting. Ohio cases show how discourse and reality diverge

AKRON, Ohio — Ahead of November’s presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud involving people suspected of voting even though they were not citizens Americans.

It coincided with a national Republican messaging strategy warning that thousands of ineligible voters could cast ballots.

“The right to vote is sacred,” 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 think you are allowed to or not. You will be held responsible.

Ultimately, their efforts resulted in only a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal complaints of voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors obtained indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over a 10-year period — and the one of them was later found to have died. That total represents just a tiny fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and tens of millions of ballots cast during that time.

The outcome and the stories of some of those now indicted illustrate the gap – both in Ohio and across the United States – between the rhetoric about non-citizen voting and the reality: It’s rare, you get arrested and sued when it happens and it doesn’t. as part of a coordinated plan to hold elections.

The Associated Press attended in-person and virtual hearings for three of the Ohio defendants over the past two weeks. Each of these cases involved people with long-standing ties to their communities who acted alone, often under the mistaken impression that they had the right to vote. They now find themselves facing felony charges and possible deportation.

Among them is Nicholas Fontaine, a 32-year-old precision sheet metal worker from Akron. He was indicted in October for illegal voting, a fourth-degree felony.

Fontaine is a Canadian-born permanent resident who moved to the United States with his mother and sister when he was 2 years old. He faces prison time and deportation over allegations that he voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections.

He remembers being a student when he was approached on the street about registering to vote.

“I think in my young teenage brain I said, ‘Well, I need to register for the draft, I should be able to vote,’” Fontaine said in an interview.

Permanent residents such as Fontaine are just one of several categories of immigrants who must register for possible military service through Selective Service but cannot legally vote.

Fontaine said he received a postcard from the local election commission in 2016 informing him of his voting location. He voted without problem. He even showed his ID before receiving his ballot.

” No problem. I went in, I voted, I turned in my voting stuff, that was it,” he said. “There wasn’t like, ‘Hey, there’s a problem here,’ or ‘There’s a thing here.’ Here is simply your (vote) paper.

Fontaine said a Department of Homeland Security official visited him at his home in 2018 or 2019, alerted him that his votes in 2016 and 2018 were illegal and warned him not to vote again. Since then, he has never done it again. That’s one reason his indictment this fall came as a shock.

He said he was never informed of his indictment and that he missed his court hearing in early December, only learning of the charges when an AP reporter knocked on his door after the audience scheduled to tell him so.

Fontaine said he grew up in a family where his American stepfather taught him the importance of voting. He said he would never have intentionally voted illegally.

“I don’t know anyone, even Americans I’ve talked to about voting, who would consider voting illegally for any reason,” he said. “Like, why would you do that?” This doesn’t make sense. They’re going to find out – clearly, they’re going to find out. And that turns one voice into two. Even doing that, can you get a hundred? How many millions of voters are there in America?

Faith Lyon, Portage County’s elections director, said local officials in the county where Fontaine is charged would have had no way to independently verify his immigration status. Each voter registration form includes a check box asking whether a person is a U.S. citizen or not and explaining that people cannot vote if they are not, she said.

In two other illegal voting cases brought before Ohio courts, the defendants did not check this box, according to their lawyers, believing that this omission would result in the elections board not registering them if they were indeed ineligible. Yet they were still registered and now face criminal charges for voting.

A day before Fontaine’s scheduled hearing, one of those defendants, Fiona Allen, 40, wept in a Cleveland courtroom as a public defender explained the charges against her.

She left Jamaica for the United States nine years ago. After turning in the voter registration form and receiving his registration, Allen voted in 2020, 2022 and 2023, according to prosecutors. The mother of two children, including a son in the U.S. Navy, and her husband of 13 years, a naturalized citizen who is also in the military, declined to comment at the courthouse. Allen pleaded not guilty.

Another Lorinda Miller, 78, appeared before a judge over Zoom last week. She seemed shocked at the prospect of facing charges.

Her lawyer said Miller, who came to the United States from Canada as a child, is affiliated with an indigenous tribe that issued her documents identifying her as a “citizen of North America.” He was told that was enough to allow him to register and vote. She was even called for jury duty, attorney Reid Yoder said.

He plans to take the case to court after Miller pleads not guilty to the charges.

“I think the integrity of the vote should be protected wholeheartedly,” Yoder said. “I think the purpose of the law is to punish people who have defrauded the system. He’s not my client. To truly cheat the system, you have to know you’re doing it. My client has nothing like that. She believes in the sanctity of voting, which 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 narrative that large numbers of immigrants without the necessary legal documents register to vote and then vote is simply not not supported by the facts, said Jay Young, Voting’s senior director. and Democracy for a Common Cause Program.

The state’s voter rolls are cleaned regularly, he said, and the penalties for voting illegally as a noncitizen are severe: fines, possible jail time and deportation.

He said the role of these immigrants and their potential to influence the election “is the most persistent false narrative we have seen throughout this election.” But he also said it served a purpose, keeping the country divided and sowing distrust in the electoral system. .

“If your guy doesn’t win or you’re a candidate that doesn’t win, you have an excuse that you can use to justify it,” he said.

___

Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.