The GOP stoked fears of noncitizens voting. Cases in Ohio show how rhetoric and reality diverge

By JULIE CARR SMYTH

AKRON, Ohio (AP) — Before the November presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud that included people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.

“The right to vote is sacred,” Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said in a statement at the time. “If you’re not a U.S. citizen, it’s illegal to vote -– whether you thought you were allowed to or not. You will be held accountable.”

In the end, their efforts led to just a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal referrals for voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors have secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years — and one was later found to have died. That total is a tiny fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and the tens of millions of ballots cast during that period.

The outcome and the stories of some of those now facing charges illustrate the gap — both in Ohio and across the United States — between the rhetoric about noncitizen voting and the reality: It’s rare, is caught and prosecuted when it does happen and does not occur as part of a coordinated scheme to throw elections.

The Associated Press attended in-person and virtual court hearings for three of the Ohio defendants over the past two weeks. Each of the cases involved people with long ties to their community who acted alone, often under a mistaken impression they were eligible 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 on one count of illegal voting, a fourth-degree felony.

Fontaine is a Canadian-born permanent resident who moved to the U.S. with his mother and sister when he was 2 years old. He is facing a possible jail term and deportation on allegations that he voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections.

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

“I think in my young teenage brain, I thought, ‘Well, I have to sign up 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 a potential military draft through the Selective Service but who cannot legally vote.

Fontaine said he received a postcard from the local board of elections in 2016 informing him of his polling place. He voted without issue. He even showed his ID before receiving his ballot.

“No problems. Went in, voted, turned my voter stuff in, that was it,” he said. “There was no, like, ‘Hey, there’s an issue here,’ or, ‘There’s a thing here.’ Just, here’s your paper (ballot).”

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

He said he never received notice that he was indicted and missed his court hearing in early December, being informed of the charges only when an AP reporter knocked on his door after the scheduled hearing and told him.

Fontaine said he was raised in a household where his American stepfather taught him the value of voting. He said he would never have cast an illegal vote intentionally.

“I don’t know any person, even like Americans I’ve talked to about voting, who would consider illegally voting for any reason,” he said. “Like, why would you do that? It doesn’t make sense. They’re going to find out — clearly, they’re going to find out. And it’s turning one vote into two. Even doing that, can you get a hundred? There’s how many millions of voters in America?”

Faith Lyon, the Portage County election director, said local officials in the county where Fontaine is charged would not have had any way to independently verify his immigration status. Each voter registration form includes a checkbox asking whether a person is a U.S. citizen or not and explaining that people cannot vote unless they are, she said.

In two other illegal voting cases moving through the Ohio courts, the defendants left that box unchecked, according to their lawyers, believing the omission would result in the election board not registering them if they were indeed ineligible. Yet they were registered anyway, and now face criminal prosecution for voting.

A day before Fontaine’s scheduled hearing, one of those defendants, 40-year-old Fiona Allen, wept outside a Cleveland courtroom when a public defender explained the charges she faced.

She had moved to the U.S. from Jamaica nine years ago. After turning in the voter registration form and receiving her registration, Allen voted in 2020, 2022 and 2023, prosecutors say. The mother of two, including a son in the U.S. Navy, and her husband of 13 years, a naturalized citizen who also is a serviceman, declined to comment at the courthouse. Allen has pleaded not guilty.

Another, 78-year-old Lorinda Miller, appeared before a judge over Zoom last week. She appeared shell-shocked about facing charges.

Her attorney said Miller, who arrived in the U.S. from Canada as a child, is affiliated with an Indigenous tribe that issued her paperwork identifying her as “a citizen of North America.” She was told that was sufficient to allow her to register and vote. She’s even been called for jury duty, said lawyer Reid Yoder.

He plans to take the case to trial after Miller pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“I think the integrity of the vote should be protected, wholeheartedly,” Yoder said. “I think the intent of the law is to punish people who defrauded the system. That is not my client. To really defraud the system, you have to know you’re doing it. My client’s nothing like that. She believes in the sanctity of the vote, 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 — that the narrative of widespread numbers of immigrants without the necessary legal documents registering to vote and then voting is simply not backed up by the facts, said Jay Young, senior director of the Voting and Democracy Program for Common Cause.

State voter rolls are cleaned regularly, he said, and the penalties for casting an illegal ballot as a noncitizen are severe: fines, the potential for a prison sentence and deportation.

He said the role of such immigrants and their potential to sway the election “was the most enduring false narrative that we saw throughout this election.” But he also said it served a purpose, to keep the country divided and sow distrust in the election system.

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

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