Moises Lima Jr., a Brazilian national. Gordon Louis, a Haitian non-citizen. Roberto Figueredo, a Cuban whose lawful permanent resident status had already been revoked. All three just pleaded guilty to voting in federal elections they were never eligible to participate in.
They admitted it. On the record. To the Department of Justice.
U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida announced the guilty pleas on Monday. "Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship," Quiñones said in a statement. "Federal law is clear: only United States citizens may vote in federal elections. These defendants admitted that they knowingly violated that law."
Two of the three — Louis and Figueredo — voted in the 2020 federal elections. Lima voted in the 2024 federal election after obtaining lawful permanent resident status, which does not confer the right to vote. Figueredo's case is particularly notable: he submitted a fraudulent Florida voter registration in January 2020, falsely claiming U.S. citizenship on the form, despite his permanent resident status having already been revoked.
All three were charged with voting by an alien. All three pleaded guilty.
For years, the standard Democratic response to concerns about non-citizen voting has been that it doesn't happen, or that it happens so rarely it's statistically irrelevant and not worth addressing. The media has echoed this line reliably. Every attempt to verify citizenship on voter rolls has been framed as voter suppression, a solution in search of a problem.
The timing here is remarkable. On the same Monday that three non-citizens admitted in federal court to illegally casting ballots in Florida, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., issued a ruling blocking the Trump administration from using its revamped SAVE database to help states verify voter citizenship. The judge wrote that federal officials "haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
So the system designed to catch people like Lima, Louis, and Figueredo before they vote — blocked. The people it would have caught — pleading guilty in another courtroom.
Several Republican-led states had already used the SAVE database to compare voter rolls against immigration records. Judge Sooknanan ruled the administration acted unlawfully in creating the centralized database, claiming it had been used to incorrectly remove U.S. citizens from their rolls. Meanwhile, a separate Republican probe in New Jersey found hundreds of ineligible voters still sitting on the rolls.
The argument against citizenship verification has always rested on the premise that non-citizen voting is a myth. Three people just stood in federal court in Florida and made that premise a confession.
Federal law requires voters to be American citizens for federal elections. Three people who weren't citizens voted anyway, and said so under oath. The system that might have stopped them just got shut down by a federal judge.
That's not a coincidence. That's a policy choice.