Federal authorities arrested a 62-year-old Slovakian national in New Jersey for illegally voting in the 2022 midterm elections and then lying about it on a U.S. citizenship application, the latest in a growing string of noncitizen voting prosecutions that underscore a system riddled with gaps.
Marian Charitun faces two charges: one count of voting illegally in a federal election and one count of making false statements while applying for naturalization, the Daily Caller first reported. The case was brought by the United States Attorney's Office's Election Integrity Task Force.
If convicted on both counts, Charitun faces up to eleven years behind bars, one year maximum on the voting charge and up to ten years for the fraudulent citizenship application. He was also denied U.S. citizenship after federal officials discovered his voting history during the naturalization process.
The mechanics of the case are straightforward. Charitun allegedly registered to vote in New Jersey and falsely claimed he was a U.S. citizen when doing so. He then cast a ballot in the November 2022 midterms.
Later, when he applied for citizenship, he allegedly swore under penalty of perjury that he had never voted in a federal election. That claim fell apart when officials cross-referenced his voting record during the application review. His citizenship bid was denied, and federal charges followed.
The pattern is becoming familiar. In May, four green card holders in New Jersey, nationals of Liberia, Jamaica, Israel, and India, were separately charged with the same basic scheme: voting illegally in federal elections and then lying about it on naturalization paperwork. Those defendants voted in elections spanning 2020, 2022, and 2024, the New York Post reported.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the time that the administration "will not tolerate aliens who attempt to vote in our elections when they know they are not eligible." FBI Director Kash Patel was blunter: "Noncitizens voting is a federal crime, period, and while other administrations may have looked the other way in the past, those days are over."
The New Jersey cases do not exist in isolation. They point to a structural weakness in voter registration systems across multiple states, one that makes it far too easy for noncitizens to end up on the rolls.
Consider the case of Eliezer Kadoch, a 39-year-old French citizen from Toms River, New Jersey, who pleaded guilty to voting illegally in the same November 2022 midterm election. Kadoch told authorities he was automatically registered to vote when he obtained a New Jersey driver's license, a vulnerability Fox News reported has been identified in numerous states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia.
Kadoch's attorney said his client "accepted responsibility for his actions" and that "there was never any intent to violate the law or cast an unlawful ballot." The attorney noted the offense "does not require proof of criminal intent." That legal detail is worth pausing on: the system registered a noncitizen to vote without adequate safeguards, and the noncitizen bears the criminal liability.
Kadoch's case was investigated jointly by the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services through the same Election Integrity Task Force now prosecuting Charitun. He faces up to six months in prison and a $100,000 fine.
The fact that noncitizens have been found on New Jersey voter rolls for years makes the state a recurring exhibit in the election integrity debate. These are not hypothetical concerns. They are prosecuted cases with named defendants and guilty pleas.
Each new prosecution adds political weight to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification at the ballot box. The bill, H.R. 7296 in the 119th Congress, has stalled with no clear path forward.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans plan to attach the measure to a reconciliation bill, bypassing the 60-vote Senate threshold that Democrats have used to block it. Johnson framed the issue as common sense with overwhelming public support.
"We're just going to make sure you have to have proof of citizenship to register to vote and then show an ID when you turn out at the ballot box. These are 90-10 public opinion issues, and more than 70 percent of Democrats want to do it, but not the Democrats in the House and Senate, and so we've got to go around them."
Johnson's frustration is grounded in a simple political reality: the policy polls well even among Democratic voters, yet Democratic lawmakers in Washington refuse to advance it. That gap between the party's base and its elected officials is worth examining.
Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats have accused the administration of using the SAVE America Act to rig elections, a charge that looks increasingly difficult to sustain as federal prosecutors keep producing real defendants who really did vote illegally.
The Charitun arrest fits within a wider federal effort to tighten election integrity enforcement. The DOJ's Election Integrity Task Force has now produced multiple prosecutions in a single state within a matter of months. The cases share a common thread: noncitizens who registered, voted, and then tried to cover it up during the naturalization process.
That enforcement push extends beyond New Jersey. Federal investigators have raided a voter organization's headquarters in Ohio as part of a separate fraud investigation, and a federal prosecutor recently toured a ballot facility in Los Angeles County as election fraud probes expand across the country.
Critics of these prosecutions have long argued that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare and that enforcement efforts amount to political theater. But "rare" is not "nonexistent," and each new case makes the theater argument harder to maintain. The Heritage Foundation has studied the issue, and while its research found noncitizen voting is uncommon, the New Jersey cases demonstrate that when it happens, it is a federal crime with real consequences, or at least it is now.
The question is whether the current patchwork of after-the-fact prosecutions can substitute for front-end prevention. Charitun's voting history was caught only because he applied for citizenship. Kadoch was caught the same way. The four green card holders charged in May were caught the same way. Every one of these cases was discovered not by the voter registration system that let them in, but by the immigration system that flagged them on the way out.
That is not a system working as designed. That is a system catching its own failures by accident.
Voters have every right to ask why election fraud probes keep expanding while the basic legislative fix, requiring proof of citizenship to register, sits stalled on Capitol Hill. The prosecutions prove the problem exists. The stalled bill proves Congress won't fix it.
Several details in the Charitun case remain unclear. The specific date of his arrest has not been disclosed. The federal district handling the case, the precise city in New Jersey where he registered, and the specific statutes cited in the charging document have not been made public. How long Charitun lived in the United States and the exact nature of his immigration status beyond "illegal alien" are also unknown.
What is known is that he allegedly registered to vote by claiming citizenship he did not have, cast a ballot in a federal election, and then lied about it under oath. The system let him do all three before anyone noticed.
When the front door is wide open, arresting people after they walk through it is not a solution. It is an admission.