The Briefing:
- Wichita prosecutors secured a grand jury indictment against Mariana Alexandra Dewey, a 24-year-old Peruvian national with a green card, over her 2024 ballot cast without U.S. citizenship.
- Immigration agents took her into custody on Sept. 1; weeks earlier she had already pleaded guilty to a lesser state charge tied to the same vote.
- That same week, prosecutors in Minnesota charged another noncitizen with nearly identical conduct, part of a wider Justice Department push that also touched Louisiana and California.
- Her case lands as the administration asks the Supreme Court to restore a blocked citizenship-screening tool, even though independent research puts noncitizen voting at a sliver of a percent nationwide.
How Prosecutors Say She Cast a Ballot Without Being a Citizen
Court filings summarized by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Kansas describe Dewey submitting paperwork to join the state's voter rolls in November 2024, swearing under oath that she held American citizenship. Days later she filled out a provisional ballot that touched races for president, vice president, the Senate and the House. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services helped trace that registration back to her name.
Dewey holds lawful permanent residency — a green card — but never pursued naturalization, the step required before anyone can legally cast a ballot in a U.S. federal race. Agents say her signature turned up in the poll book at a Sedgwick County church that served as a voting site on Election Day 2024.
From a State Misdemeanor to a Federal Indictment
Agents showed up at Dewey's Wichita residence on the morning of Sept. 1 to make the arrest, according to a Department of Homeland Security account of the case. By that point she had already resolved a lesser matter in state court, pleading guilty under Kansas law to disorderly election conduct over the same ballot. Nine days on, a grand jury took the case federal, handing up four separate counts: one for falsely claiming citizenship, one for falsely claiming citizenship specifically to register or vote, one for fraudulent election conduct, and one for casting a ballot as a noncitizen in a federal race.
Larry Fadler, an assistant U.S. attorney based in Wichita, is handling the prosecution. Dewey's first appearance before a magistrate judge was set for Sept. 14; like anyone under indictment, she remains presumed innocent unless a court says otherwise. The district's top federal prosecutor, Ryan Kriegshauser, framed the filing as a message to anyone barred from voting, with the midterms roughly two months out. Markwayne Mullin, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, put it more bluntly, saying "this alien violated the sacred right of every American citizen."
Part of a Broader Sweep, From Minnesota to Louisiana
Dewey isn't an isolated example. Days apart, a Minnesota grand jury handed up its own indictment against Indian national Mukeshkumar Somabhai Chaudhari, accused of signing a false citizenship certificate to cast a 2024 ballot — a pair of counts that, prosecutors note, each carry a possible five-year prison term. A single Sept. 14 rollout from the Justice Department's public affairs office folded in two more matters: a Louisiana prosecution accusing a noncitizen of voting after someone else falsely registered him, and, unrelated to citizenship, a California scheme in which organizers allegedly paid unhoused residents of Skid Row to forge names on ballot-initiative petitions.
The Database Fight Behind the Headlines
These prosecutions sit alongside a much bigger legal fight over how the federal government screens voter rolls for citizenship. A March 2025 executive order pushed DHS to rebuild its longstanding immigration-status verification tool, layering in Social Security records so states could run bulk checks on registered voters. Reporting this summer put the number of voter files processed through the rebuilt tool north of 67 million, most from states with Republican leadership. A Washington judge shut down that particular use of the system back in June, writing that officials had trampled privacy protections owed to American citizens. An appellate panel left that ruling untouched on Sept. 5, with one dissenting judge arguing states ought to be free to keep relying on it. Justice Department lawyers have since gone to the Supreme Court seeking permission to switch the tool back on before early voting starts, and their filing offered a narrower figure: 65 million-plus voters screened across 26 states, with 28,635 flagged as possible noncitizens.
Separately, and without publishing supporting data, DHS has claimed roughly a quarter-million noncitizens sit on the combined rolls of California, Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Jersey, nearly 191,000 of them in California alone. Golden State election chief Shirley Weber fired back, telling the agency she doubted the numbers' accuracy and pointing out her office had never turned its voter file over to federal officials to begin with.
A Rare Crime That Still Shapes Policy
Nonpartisan research keeps landing on the same conclusion: noncitizens almost never vote. A frequently cited Brennan Center for Justice review of dozens of jurisdictions tallying roughly 23 million ballots in 2016 turned up only 30 suspected cases, a rounding error against the total. Separately, a newspaper review of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation's own fraud-case tracker counted just 85 noncitizen-voting cases nationwide across two decades ending in 2023.
Officials point to files like Dewey's as justification for tighter screening before November. Critics counter that the underlying numbers show something else entirely: a genuine federal crime, with real consequences for the people charged, but one whose actual scope falls well short of the systemic threat described in Washington.
