Federal prosecutors have filed voting charges against 18 more noncitizens in North Carolina, the Justice Department announced Thursday, bringing the number of people charged in the state this year to 30. The cases come in the final days before Tuesday's midterm elections.
The new cases were filed in all three of the state's federal districts: nine in the Eastern District, five in the Middle District and four in the Western District. Seventeen of the defendants are lawful permanent residents, green card holders who are not U.S. citizens, and the 18th, a 43-year-old Guatemalan man living in Robeson County, is in the country illegally, prosecutors say. Sixteen face two counts, falsely claiming U.S. citizenship in order to vote and voting by an alien. The other two were charged by information with voting by an alien alone, according to the release and a WBTV rundown of the filings.
Some of the accusations reach back more than two decades. Gregory Eugene Wade, 64, a Bermuda native who lives in Wake County, is accused of registering in 2000 and voting in 12 general elections through 2024, along with two primaries. Elizabeth Margaret Crudup, 52, a Kenyan native living in Harnett County, is accused of registering in 2008 and voting in nine general elections and nine primaries, the latest of them this year. Every one of the 18 cases is tied to the 2024 election, and in the Western District three defendants are accused of falsely claiming citizenship on an authorization-to-vote form or an early voting application before casting ballots in the fall of 2024.
"If you're not an American citizen, you cannot vote in our federal elections," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in the department's announcement. Ellis Boyle, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, said his district's indictments, now numbering 21, should serve as "an unmistakable message ahead of the 2026 election: if you vote illegally, we are looking, we will find out, and we will prosecute you." Russ Ferguson, the U.S. attorney for the Western District, pointed to last year's municipal elections in North Carolina, when he said 14 races were decided by two votes, 15 by a single vote and seven ended in ties. "Every vote matters," he said.
Falsely claiming citizenship to vote carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and voting by an alien carries up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, the department said. Its release notes that an indictment or information contains only accusations and that every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The prosecutions grew out of referrals from state election officials. Sam Hayes, who leads the State Board of Elections, told WRAL that his office began the review in April, using the federal SAVE database to flag registered voters who might not be citizens and then running its own analysis before sending names to federal investigators, a step meant to catch the kind of false positives critics had warned the database could produce. The work moved ahead once the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the database to be used for voter list maintenance. Hayes said the state has given the FBI more names than the 30 charged so far, though he would not say how many, and earlier this year the state sent letters to about 1,300 voters the database had flagged as possible noncitizens.
Hayes also said some noncitizens may have been put on the rolls by mistake at the DMV, where most people in the state register to vote when they get a driver's license. Hilary Harris Klein, a voting rights attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told WRAL, "We have much bigger problems with our elections than non-citizen voting," pointing to thousands of ballots from eligible voters that she expects to be rejected under stricter mail voting and identification rules, though she said the small number of cases "shows a success in addressing those issues." She also questioned bringing charges after early voting had begun; Hayes said the timing had more to do with the legal challenges over the database than anything else. North Carolina has more than 7 million registered voters, and 5.7 million of them cast ballots in 2024. The Justice Department's own investigations have shown voting by noncitizens to be extremely rare, WRAL noted.
The charges landed as the Justice Department prepares to send federal election monitors to Wake, Alamance and Mecklenburg counties for Tuesday's vote, part of an effort that Boyle said aims to put 1,000 monitors in all 50 states on Election Day, more than double the 388 the department sent to polling places during the 2022 midterms, WRAL reported.