A 50-year-old Mauritanian illegal immigrant who has been marked for deportation since 2002 was busted last week in Philadelphia for allegedly falsely claiming citizenship to cast a ballot in the 2024 election. Mahady Sacko, who goes by the nickname "Sacko Scorpion," was picked up in a joint operation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI.
According to authorities, Sacko has voted in every election since 2008. He is a registered Democrat. He has yet to enter a plea.
When contacted, Sacko denied everything.
"Everything is a lie! They are lying about me!"
His case is not an anomaly. According to the New York Post, it is one of nearly a dozen arrests and cases uncovered in recent months involving non-citizens who allegedly cast ballots in American elections. The accused hail from Mauritania, Canada, China, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Ukraine, Jamaica, Iraq, and India. They registered across party lines. They voted in primaries and general elections. Some did it once. Others did it for decades.
And the system that was supposed to stop them did nothing.
The cases span the country and reveal a pattern that no serious person can dismiss as isolated.
In North Carolina, 70-year-old Canadian Denis Bouchard pleaded guilty on March 6 to two counts of making false claims of citizenship to vote in the 2022 and 2024 elections. He faces 10 years in prison. A man of the same name and age had voted in every election since 2004, according to reporting by The Post. He was only removed from the voter rolls after his conviction.
Two decades of ballots. Nobody noticed.
In Michigan, 19-year-old Chinese national Haoxiang Gao, a student at the University of Michigan, was charged last June with illegally voting in the 2024 election. At his arraignment, Gao surrendered his Chinese passport to the judge, then boarded a flight from Detroit to Shanghai using a different passport with a different serial number, according to the FBI. He remains wanted by U.S. authorities. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China. According to voter information obtained by The Post, Gao is still an active, registered voter in Michigan.
An October 2025 sweep in Arkansas picked up three non-citizens accused of voter fraud:
In Florida, a Ukrainian mother-daughter pair, Svitlana Demydenko, 53, and Yelyzaveta Demydenko, 22, both registered Democrats, allegedly cast ballots in the 2024 general election after arriving in the U.S. in 2021 on nonimmigrant visas, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. They were arrested last April, have pleaded not guilty, and their case is set for trial later in 2026.
Also in Florida, Jacqueline Dianne Wallace, a 52-year-old Jamaican national who had been in the country illegally for over 15 years, registered online from a community college computer network as a Republican and cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential primary, officials claim. Her case is pending. If convicted, she faces five years in prison.
In upstate New York, 45-year-old Iraqi national Akeel Abdul Jamiel was charged last April with illegally voting in the 2020 election. Jamiel had registered with the Conservative Party, had written pro-Trump screeds, and in 2019 tried to sue then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio over the negative impact of illegal immigration, claiming the U.S. was "under invasion." He has yet to enter a plea and could face a year in prison and up to a $100,000 fine if convicted.
And in Allentown, Pennsylvania, 47-year-old Indian citizen Kaushalkumar Patel will stand trial this month for allegedly voting illegally in the 2020 election. His lawyer, Philip Steinberg, previously said he's waiting for more information from the government.
"Mr. Patel has lived a law-abiding life in the United States for over 20 years. He works, pays his taxes and is an active participant in his community. He is also the proud father of two young daughters."
Living a law-abiding life and casting a ballot you are legally barred from casting are contradictory propositions. The law does not carve out exceptions for good fathers.
These cases cross party lines, nationalities, and states. What they share is a voter registration infrastructure that treats citizenship verification as optional.
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, described the scope plainly.
"The reality is aliens are voting in American elections."
Adams noted that Pennsylvania stands out for what he called "disastrous alien voter registration." The Keystone State has admitted a glitch in its "motor voter" program inadvertently allowed approximately 100,000 non-citizens to register to vote, though some state officials dispute that number. Even if the true figure is a fraction of the estimate, the scale of the failure is staggering.
The mechanism is not some shadowy conspiracy. It is bureaucratic negligence dressed up as accessibility. Adams described how non-citizens end up on the rolls.
"At times, it's an organic process of aliens getting sucked in unwittingly. Maybe they'd been whipping down Modelos [beers] at a festival and they're doing some guy a favor who is in their face with a clipboard. Or they're at the DMV and get these pop-up windows asking them to register. They think, 'I must be allowed.' "
That framing matters. The left insists non-citizen voting is so rare it's not worth addressing. Adams conceded the phenomenon is not as sweeping as some claim.
"It's way worse than the left says, but it's way better than some others say."
But his core point landed harder.
"I wish it were a conspiracy plot because it would be easier to bust. This is systemic failure."
A conspiracy can be dismantled. A system that passively registers ineligible voters, asks no hard questions, and removes no one until a federal arrest occurs is a different kind of problem. It is a problem baked into the architecture of how Americans register to vote.
The left's standard deflection is that non-citizen voting is too rare to matter. Consider the math.
On Friday, a recount confirmed that the mayor of Boca Raton, Florida, won by just five votes. Five. In a country where about 14 million people live legally but are not citizens, according to the Pew Research Center in 2023, and where an unknown additional number live illegally, even a small fraction reaching the ballot box can determine outcomes in tight races.
Sen. Mike Lee put it directly.
"In tight down-ballot races, even hundreds of illegal votes can swing an election, and every illegal vote cast is an attack on a legitimate vote cast by a real citizen."
Every illegal ballot cancels a legal one. That is not a hypothetical. It is arithmetic.
The SAVE Act, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy and co-sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Mike Lee, would mandate proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or enhanced driver's license, to register to vote in federal elections. The House passed it. It is now languishing in the Senate, lacking the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced the Senate will debate the SAVE Act next week, but stated it lacks the votes to pass it. President Trump has escalated pressure by threatening to refuse to sign any other bills until they pass.
Roy framed the stakes clearly.
"Americans want voter ID and the guarantee that only citizens are voting in our elections. The House has done its job, now it's time for the Senate to show up to work."
He also issued a challenge aimed squarely at the opposition.
"Senators should stand up and defend their positions. If Democrats want to block protections ensuring only citizens vote, they should have to explain that to the American people."
That is exactly the right posture. Force the vote. Make every senator go on the record. Polling shows the SAVE Act is extremely popular, supported by over 70% of Americans and roughly half of Democrats. If Senate Democrats want to filibuster a bill that their own voters support, let them do it in daylight.
Lee highlighted the legal absurdity that makes the legislation necessary in the first place.
"It may surprise many Americans to learn that the Supreme Court — wrongly, in my view — has interpreted the law to forbid states from checking citizenship for voter registration. The SAVE America Act would reverse this situation."
A 2013 Supreme Court decision required only a sworn affirmation of citizenship for voter registration. No document. No verification. Just a promise. The cases catalogued above show what that promise is worth.
For years, the institutional left has maintained that non-citizen voting is a myth, a fever dream of the paranoid right. Every time a case surfaces, the response is the same: isolated incident, no evidence of a pattern, not worth changing policy over.
Sen. Lee cut through that reflex with a line that deserves to follow Democrats into every press conference on the subject.
"Every few weeks, we learn that 'the thing that never happens' has happened again."
A Mauritanian man has been voting as a Democrat in Philadelphia since 2008. A Canadian voting in North Carolina since 2004. A Chinese student fleeing the country on a second passport. A Cuban felon with a deportation order from 1999 is registering in Arkansas. A mother-daughter duo from Ukraine on non-immigrant visas, casting ballots in Florida.
These are not anomalies. They are symptoms of a system designed without safeguards, defended by people who benefit from the ambiguity. The question has never been whether non-citizens vote in American elections. The question is why one political party fights so hard to make sure no one checks.