Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn announced charges against three people accused of voting despite not being U.S. citizens, part of a Justice Department effort that has swept up dozens of lawful permanent residents across the country in recent days. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, based in Brooklyn, disclosed the charges, though it did not immediately detail the identities or specific allegations against two of the three defendants.
The one defendant publicly identified, Eoin Cranney, is a citizen of Ireland and a lawful permanent resident of the United States. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, Cranney was charged by indictment with making a false claim of citizenship in order to vote and with voting by an alien in a federal election.
Part of a Much Larger Federal Push
The Brooklyn case lands amid a far larger nationwide campaign. In California, federal authorities have charged 28 people from across the state with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being citizens, according to the Los Angeles Times. All 28 are lawful permanent residents, and some were charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork; 21 of them are suspected of actually casting ballots in one or more elections, the paper reports.
As of Monday morning, 11 of the 28 California defendants had been arrested, while authorities said the remaining 17 would be taken into custody soon, per the same account. The Justice Department also asked a court to order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from roughly 20,000 voters identified as likely noncitizens until their citizenship could be verified, though the outcome of that request was not specified. NPR separately reported that the Justice Department announced charges against 28 green card holders across California accused of illegally voting or registering to vote.
Similar Cases Stretch From Idaho to North Carolina
The California and Brooklyn cases follow a string of similar federal actions elsewhere. In North Carolina, prosecutors charged Robert Harold Corbett, a 69-year-old native of Canada and lawful permanent resident of Wake County, with falsely claiming citizenship to vote and voting by an alien, according to a Justice Department announcement from the Eastern District of North Carolina U.S. Attorney's Office. A separate Justice Department release announced charges involving 16 noncitizens across North Carolina, New York and Idaho, including an illegal alien, in connection with illegal voting, false claims of citizenship and related election crimes, according to the Justice Department.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced that a South African national and lawful permanent resident was charged with unlawfully voting in the November 2024 federal election, with the agency saying it provided assistance during the investigation, per a release from USCIS.
Data Shows Noncitizen Voting Remains Rare
The surge in prosecutions comes as independent data continues to show that confirmed noncitizen voting is uncommon. An analysis by the New York Times found that federal and state charges for noncitizen voting have not exceeded 25 people in any single state in a recent election, and that the ballots tied to 2024 general-election cases represented no more than 0.0002 percent of ballots cast in each affected state, according to the New York Times. Since 2025, federal prosecutors have charged 131 people with illegally registering or voting as noncitizens; of those, 25 were found guilty or pleaded guilty, two were acquitted, and four had charges dropped or dismissed, the Times reports.
By comparison, federal prosecutors charged just 13 people in noncitizen voting cases during the Biden administration, and the Heritage Foundation identified 71 criminal convictions nationwide for noncitizen voting between 2000 and 2025, per the same Times analysis. A separate Heritage Foundation database cited by the Migration Policy Institute identified just 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003 and 2022, and a Brennan Center study found suspected noncitizen voting accounted for only 0.0001 percent of 23.5 million votes cast across 42 surveyed jurisdictions in 2016.
Enforcement Efforts Have Produced False Positives
Those enforcement pushes have also generated significant errors. In Nevada, officials found that all 185 people the Justice Department had flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens, the Los Angeles Times reported. In Iowa, officials initially claimed 2,176 suspected noncitizens were on voter rolls, but revised that figure down to 277 after comparing the list with a federal database, according to the Times' analysis; ultimately, 11 noncitizens were charged with illegally registering and voting there, though only one faced active charges tied to the 2024 general election.
A federal judge recently found that Department of Homeland Security field operations targeting suspected noncitizen voters in nine states — California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin — relied on flawed data and likely violated the Voting Rights Act, according to NPR's report on the ruling. NPR also noted that state reviews and audits have consistently found voting by noncitizens to be extremely rare, a conclusion the Migration Policy Institute's research echoes as well.
No further details on the two unnamed Brooklyn defendants, including their charges or immigration status, have been released by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.
