Federal prosecutors say 28 green card holders voted or registered to vote in California elections when the law barred them from doing either.
Story Snapshot
- The Justice Department charged 28 individuals with election crimes across California, arresting 11 of them.
- Officials labeled the effort “Operation Protect the Vote,” run jointly by all four California U.S. Attorney’s Offices.
- One defendant, Amandeep Kaur, allegedly registered in December 2022 and voted in the 2024 election while still seeking citizenship.
- California’s Attorney General says the 28 cases amount to 0.0001% of the state’s 23 million registered voters, far from proof of systemic fraud.
What The Justice Department Says Happened
The Justice Department announced on October 19, 2026, that 28 foreign nationals living in California face charges tied to voting or registering to vote while holding green cards instead of citizenship. Federal agents arrested 11 of them. Officials say every defendant was a lawful permanent resident, a status that lets someone live and work in the United States but does not allow voting in federal elections.
Today DOJ charged 28 noncitizens across California with federal election crimes.
All were on the list of 20k we sent to California, which has refused to even look at the list.
It's not too late for California to step up & protect the votes of American citizens. pic.twitter.com/5QAlPwBBjm
— Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter (@PADAGMcCotter) October 19, 2026
The named case against Amandeep Kaur, 30, of Rancho Palos Verdes, gives the clearest picture so far. Prosecutors allege she registered to vote in December 2022 and cast a ballot in the November 2024 election, all while her citizenship application was still pending. Some defendants also face charges for allegedly lying on naturalization paperwork, meaning the case ties together two separate government processes: immigration review and voter registration.
Why California Officials Are Pushing Back
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told the Justice Department it has not backed up a separate, larger claim that 20,000 names on the state’s voter rolls belong to noncitizens. Her office pointed to Nevada, where a similar review flagged about 16,000 potential noncitizen voters and turned up zero confirmed fraud cases. That history matters because it shows big numbers on a suspect list don’t always translate into real crimes.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta did not deny the 28 charges outright, but he put them in context. He noted that 28 cases out of 23 million registered voters works out to roughly 0.0001%, a figure he says does not point to a broken system. UC San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser backed that view, saying voter fraud stays rare nationwide and shows up across party lines, not tied to one side.
The Los Angeles Times reported federal officials themselves gave shifting estimates, moving from a ceiling of more than 190,000 suspected names down to a “floor” of 20,000 high-confidence cases. That kind of range suggests the broader list mixes strong and weak evidence together, which is a fair thing for reporters and defense lawyers to question even as the 28 specific charges stand on their own.
What The Complaints Don’t Yet Show
Charges are accusations, not convictions, and that distinction matters here. The public announcements give totals and one detailed example but don’t release the full complaints for all 28 people. Two San Diego defendants reportedly told investigators they believed they already had citizenship through their mothers, and another said he turned in a blank ballot. Those explanations don’t prove innocence, but they show the cases aren’t uniform, and some may turn on intent rather than a clear-cut lie.
How This Fits The Bigger Pattern
Noncitizen voting cases tend to generate outsized political attention relative to their numbers. A Brennan Center review of 42 jurisdictions covering 23.5 million votes cast in 2016 found only about 30 suspected cases referred for further action, a rate near 0.0001%. President Trump’s first administration brought similar charges in 2018 against 19 people in North Carolina, and the pattern of small case counts drawing large political debate has repeated since.
None of that history erases the seriousness of what prosecutors allege in California. If someone who isn’t a citizen knowingly registered and cast a ballot, that’s a real crime under federal law, and enforcing it protects the integrity every voter deserves. The fair reading is straightforward: individual violations can and should be prosecuted case by case, while claims of election-wide fraud require far more than two dozen complaints to prove.
The next test comes in court, where evidence standards are higher than a press release. Full complaints, immigration records, and ballot histories for all 28 defendants will show whether this was a handful of individual violations or the leading edge of something larger. Until then, Californians on both sides of this fight have real points, and voters deserve the full record, not just the headline.
Operation Protect the Vote will likely keep drawing scrutiny as more documents surface. Whether it proves a narrow enforcement success or becomes a template for broader federal-state clashes over voter rolls depends on what the underlying case files actually show once they’re public.
