Phath Vorn came to America from Cambodia. He has convictions for assault with intent to murder and weapons possession. According to federal authorities, he isn't a citizen, and he's been voting in American elections since 1992.
America has held nine presidential elections since then.
Nobody checked.
Aden Hassan Aden, from Somalia, has convictions for domestic violence, drug possession and larceny. Authorities say he voted in the 2020 federal election.
Nobody checked.
Mai Tran, from Vietnam, has convictions for fraud, burglary, drug possession, larceny and credit card fraud. Authorities say she voted in 2024.
If you voted in 2024, Mai Tran's ballot counted exactly as much as yours did.
Someone is checking now. Vorn, Aden and Tran are among the cases federal immigration authorities have made public in the last days before the midterms, as part of a nationwide crackdown on non-citizens who registered or voted illegally.
"American elections are for Americans only," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter was even blunter: "Illegal voting is just that: illegal. If you're not an American citizen, you cannot vote in our federal elections."
The cases keep coming. Federal prosecutors in North Carolina's Eastern District just charged 18 more people, bringing that state's total to 30 arrests for illegal voting. In mid-October, 16 people were arrested across nine states. This week in Florida, five green-card holders were arrested for voting in the 2021, 2022 and 2024 elections. The Justice Department says it has now arrested or indicted more than 200 people.
DHS says it has 1,620 active non-citizen voting investigations, with 151 arrests so far. It's also checking about 300,000 more names against state voter rolls.
For years, Americans who raised this issue were told it was a myth. The number everyone quoted came from a 2017 study by the left-leaning Brennan Center, which found about 30 suspected cases of non-citizen voting out of 23.5 million votes in the places it looked.
Thirty. That was the number. Case closed, the experts said, and anyone who kept asking was pushing a "conspiracy theory" to justify voter ID.
The flaw was obvious from the start. You can't find what nobody looks for. For decades, almost nobody checked voter rolls against immigration records, and then the lack of cases got treated as proof there was nothing to find.
The Justice Department has now arrested or charged more than 200 people. That's more than six times the Brennan Center's number, and DHS hasn't finished going through the 300,000 names.
Close elections show why this matters. In 2008, Al Franken won a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota by 312 votes out of nearly 2.9 million. That seat gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed to pass Obamacare. When a race comes down to 312 votes, every illegal ballot counts.
Every illegal ballot also cancels a legal one. When a non-citizen votes, an American citizen's vote disappears.
The people who spent a decade calling this a conspiracy theory are now watching ICE post mugshots of non-citizens with rap sheets, including one for assault with intent to murder, who voted in American elections.
Phath Vorn cast his first illegal vote in 1992. It took until 2026 for somebody to check.