At least seven people were indicted in the Eastern District of North Carolina on allegations of lying about their citizenship and casting ballots in the November 2024 presidential election. Six are set to make their first court appearance Thursday morning at the federal courthouse in Raleigh, the same day early in-person voting opens across the state.
The six defendants set to appear, named in the indictments, are Lionel Paul, Karl Fout, Ludagardys Matthews, Edduard Sosa, James Herrmann, and Romana Abreu-Exia, according to WRAL. All six were indicted in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the station reports, and were added to Thursday's court calendar late Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the hearings were set to begin. Federal records show the indictments were actually handed down last week, on October 5, but remained sealed until Magistrate Judge Brian Meyers ordered them unsealed this week.
Timing Collides With Early Voting
The unsealing lands at a politically charged moment: North Carolina's early in-person voting begins Thursday, the same day the six defendants are due in court. U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle has scheduled a press conference for 2 p.m. Thursday; the release described its subject as “recent actions,” according to the same outlet. It is important to note that an indictment is merely an accusation — none of the six has been convicted, and each retains the legal presumption of innocence unless proven guilty.
The charges echo a case that played out in the same federal district earlier this year. In June, U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III sentenced 70-year-old Canadian citizen Denis Bouchard to two months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to making false statements of citizenship to vote in North Carolina's 2022 and 2024 elections, as reported by the U.S. Department of Justice. Bouchard had lived in the U.S. since the 1960s and had cast ballots in nine federal elections between 2004 and 2024 before Boyle's office prosecuted him. Hoodline previously covered the Wilmington case.
Federal Statutes Carry Steep Penalties
Federal law treats lying about citizenship on a voter registration form and actually casting an illegal ballot as separate offenses. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f), knowingly making a false claim of U.S. citizenship to register or vote in a federal election is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, according to Alma. Separately, under 18 U.S.C. § 611, the act of voting itself as a noncitizen in a federal election is a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in prison and fines as high as $100,000, per the same source.
Beyond criminal exposure, federal immigration law adds another layer of consequence. A noncitizen who votes unlawfully or falsely claims citizenship faces deportability under INA § 237 and a permanent bar to establishing the “good moral character” required for naturalization, even without a formal conviction, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those immigration consequences operate independently of whatever happens in the criminal courtroom.
A Rare Crime, Prosecuted Aggressively
Despite the attention these cases draw, noncitizen voting has historically been exceedingly uncommon in North Carolina. A post-election audit by the North Carolina State Board of Elections after the 2016 general election found just 41 legally present noncitizens who voted out of nearly 4.8 million ballots cast statewide — and investigators at the time noted some of those registrations stemmed from DMV system errors or mistaken advice given during registration drives. Even so, the Eastern District has a history of pursuing these cases aggressively: in August 2018, federal prosecutors there indicted 19 foreign nationals for illegally voting in the 2016 election following a multi-agency investigation.
Boyle, who was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina in August 2025 by Attorney General Pam Bondi, leads an office covering 44 eastern counties and employing 58 federal prosecutors, according to the Department of Justice. This week's indictments arrive alongside a broader Justice Department push: federal officials have announced election-related criminal charges involving 16 individuals across multiple districts, with cases in Pennsylvania, Alabama, and New Mexico. In September, federal prosecutors in Minnesota separately obtained grand jury indictments against 10 noncitizens on voter fraud charges tied to state and federal elections.
State Election Officials Also Reviewing Rolls
The federal indictments land in the same week that the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it is mailing letters to 1,392 registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, asking them to voluntarily verify their citizenship status, according to Democracy Docket. Those flagged registrants represent roughly 0.02% of the state's 7.9 million registered voters, and receiving a letter does not automatically cancel anyone's registration. North Carolina voter roll cleanup efforts have included the discovery of 34,000 deceased names still listed on state rolls.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Haughton was designated District Election Officer for the Eastern District in 2024, a role overseeing election crime investigations across the region. With early voting now underway and Boyle's press conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon, the six newly indicted defendants will begin working through a federal court process that, for now, leaves their guilt or innocence legally undetermined.
