On June 11, a federal grand jury indicted Australian national Denis Nataly Migliore for illegally voting in the 2024 presidential election. Migliore, a lawful permanent resident on a green card living in Franklinton, Louisiana, is accused of not only illegally voting in the elections of November 2022 and November 2024, but also of making false statements and falsely claiming American citizenship.
The indictment from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Louisiana states that Migliore “knowingly made false claims to U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote in a Federal election” sometime in October 2022. The accused then cast ballots on November 8, 2022, and November 5, 2024, with the full knowledge that they had no legal right to vote.
Agents with the Justice Department arrested Migliore on July 1 at the federal courthouse in New Orleans. If convicted of the charges, Migliore faces up to five years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
The news of Migliore’s illegal voting comes at a time when the Trump administration continues to cajole and threaten Republican senators who seem incapable of passing the SAVE Act. This past week, President Trump publicly announced that the SAVE Act, a key piece of the MAGA agenda, would be tied to funding bills for the Department of War. Writing on his Truth Social account on Tuesday, President Trump argued that “The SAVE AMERICA ACT, which everyone is asking for…can be passed, very quickly, ensuring that the United States of America stays FREE for Generations [sic] to come.”
The SAVE Act, if passed, would require individual voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before registering to vote in federal elections. The SAVE Act has so far stalled in Congress, where Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has repeatedly stated that there are not enough votes among Republicans for it to pass. For their part, Senate Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unanimously opposed the bill as discriminatory and based on the unfounded idea that thousands, if not millions, of immigrants cast illegal ballots in American elections each year.
While the data is imprecise, it is known that the crime of casting illegal ballots does occur. Two years ago, a New York Post exclusive found that welfare offices in at least 46 states provided voter registration forms to immigrants without requiring proof of citizenship. One of these states is the Commonwealth of Virginia, where, on Thursday, Jose Maria Hernandez Bautista, 43, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for aggravated identity theft and making false statements while applying for a U.S. passport. Bautista, who was deported in 2007 and twice in 2011, used a stolen identity to obtain multiple driver’s licenses in Alabama and North Carolina, as well as registering to vote in Virginia in 2016. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia believes that Bautista voted in the federal elections of 2016 and 2020.
The true scale of illegal voting in the United States is currently unknown; however, it is clear that it does occur and often overlaps with other major concerns of the Trump administration, including illegal immigration, crime, identity theft, and corrupting of the electoral system.
