Less than 24 hours before polls open for Election Day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it charged 63 people in 15 states with voting illegally — including a Samoan national who allegedly cast a ballot in Utah in 2024.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called Monday’s announcement, made on the eve of the midterm elections, “the largest surge of voter-fraud arrests since President Trump returned to office.”

“These foreign nationals allegedly took advantage of the trust of the American people and flouted the laws that govern our nation’s elections,” Blanche said in a news release. “This Department of Justice will continue investigating and prosecuting voter fraud to restore confidence in our electoral system.”

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal or state elections. According to court records, the Samoan national is accused of illegally casting a ballot in Utah in the 2024 presidential election. Their gender was not clear from the filings.

The Tribune is not naming the accused voter at this time because it generally doesn’t cover low-level criminal charges.

They were arrested in Alaska last week and charged with a class A misdemeanor. In a court hearing Friday, they denied the allegations, then got assigned a public defender and released, according to court records.

If convicted of the misdemeanor, the Samoan national could face up to one year in prison and a fine of as much as $100,000.

Nearly 200 charged across about half the states

The Justice Department said it has charged 195 people in 25 states with voting or registering to vote illegally in the past nine weeks.

In some instances, the individuals voted in multiple elections, including one woman from North Carolina who voted in the last nine general and primary elections.

The New York Times contacted a number of the individuals who were charged and reported that some had received information on how to register to vote or were contacted by canvassers and believed they were eligible to cast a ballot because of confusion and language barriers.

Since his 2020 electoral loss, President Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, that U.S. elections are rife with widespread voter fraud — including by noncitizens.

In May, an audit of Utah’s voter database found that 99.72% of registered voters were verifiable U.S. citizens. The review of more than 2 million voter registration records identified about 27 alleged noncitizens, whose names were immediately removed from voter rolls, and 25 possible noncitizens, who were given 30 days to provide proof of citizenship.

According to the audit, approximately 13 of those individuals cast ballots. Nearly all of the 52 noncitizens or probable noncitizens were lawful permanent residents or individuals who were brought to the U.S. as children and remain under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — commonly known as DACA — immigration policy.

Search for widespread voter fraud

Monday’s announcement comes in the eleventh hour of an election cycle in which Trump’s Republican Party is struggling to retain control of Congress. In the months leading up to the election, his administration has tried and failed to establish proof of pervasive voter fraud, and it has vilified election officials in the process.

Over the last year, the Trump administration has sued chief election officials in Utah and 29 other states and Washington, D.C., after they refused to hand over complete, unredacted copies of their voter rolls.

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said the DOJ had no legal basis for the demand and that it violated Utah’s data privacy laws. The department later disclosed in a letter that it was investigating her, along with other election officials it was suing.

A federal judge dismissed the case against Henderson last week. The DOJ is so far unsuccessful in its quest to obtain voter databases — district courts have tossed 26 other similar lawsuits across the country.

In its hunt for voter fraud, the Trump administration has also attacked by-mail voting.

The DOJ announced in September that a federal grand jury had indicted a Utah postal worker, Damon Matai Seei, on a felony charge of delay or destruction of mail after he allegedly discarded hundreds of mail ballots in a church dumpster in Eagle Mountain.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a news conference announcing the charges that the postal worker’s alleged actions show “voting fraud is real.” Seei, who had been filling in for a coworker, told investigators he felt “overwhelmed” and attributed his decision to “laziness.”

Auditors have repeatedly concluded — including in a review of the June primary — that they “did not observe significant fraud” in Utah’s elections. A recent Legislature-commissioned study by Utah Valley University said the state’s elections are “highly secure.”

This year, in an unprecedented move, the DOJ is deploying a thousand election monitors to all 50 states. A dozen of those election monitors will be stationed in Salt Lake County.