Before the November presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud that included people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.
“The right to vote is sacred,” Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said in a statement at the time. “If you’re not a U.S. citizen, it’s illegal to vote -– whether you thought you were allowed to or not. You will be held accountable.”
In the end, their efforts led to just a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal referrals for voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors have secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years — and one was later found to have died. That total is a tiny fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and the tens of millions of ballots cast during that period.
The outcome and the stories of some of those now facing charges illustrate the gap — both in Ohio and across the United States — between the rhetoric about noncitizen voting and the reality: It’s rare
, is caught and prosecuted when it does happen and does not occur
as part of a coordinated scheme to throw elections.
The Associated Press attended in-person and virtual court hearings for three of the Ohio defendants over the past two weeks. Each of the cases involved people with long ties to their community who acted alone, often under a mistaken impression they were eligible to vote. They now find themselves facing felony charges and possible deportation.
Nicholas Fontaine
Among them is Nicholas Fontaine, a 32-year-old precision sheet metal worker from Akron. He was indicted in October on one count of illegal voting, a fourth-degree felony.
Fontaine is a Canadian-born permanent resident who moved to the U.S. with his mother and sister when he was 2 years old. He is facing a possible jail term and deportation on allegations that he voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections.
He recalls being a college student when he was approached on the street about registering to vote.
“I think in my young teenage brain, I thought, ‘Well, I have to sign up for the draft, I should be able to vote,’” Fontaine said in an interview.
Permanent residents such as Fontaine are just one of several categories of immigrants who must register for a potential military draft through the Selective Service
but who cannot legally vote.
Fontaine said he received a postcard from the local board of elections in 2016 informing him of his polling place. He voted without issue. He even showed his ID before receiving his ballot.
“No problems. Went in, voted, turned my voter stuff in, that was it,” he said. “There was no, like, ‘Hey, there’s an issue here,’ or, ‘There’s a thing here.’ Just, here’s your paper (ballot).”
Fontaine said a Department of Homeland Security official visited him at his home in either 2018 or 2019, alerted him to the fact that his votes in 2016 and 2018 had been illegal and warned him not to vote again. Since then, he never has. That’s one reason why his indictment this fall came as a shock.
He said he never received notice that he was indicted and missed his court hearing in early December, being informed of the charges only when an AP reporter knocked on his door after the scheduled hearing and told him.
Fontaine said he was raised in a household where his American stepfather taught him the value of voting. He said he would never have cast an illegal vote intentionally.
“I don’t know any person, even like Americans I’ve talked to about voting, who would consider illegally voting for any reason,” he said. “Like, why would you do that? It doesn’t make sense. They’re going to find out — clearly, they’re going to find out. And it’s turning one vote into two. Even doing that, can you get a hundred? There’s how many millions of voters in America?”
Faith Lyon, the Portage County election director, said local officials in the county where Fontaine is charged would not have had any way to independently verify his immigration status. Each voter registration form includes a checkbox asking whether a person is a U.S. citizen or not and explaining that people cannot vote unless they are, she said.
In two other illegal voting cases moving through the Ohio courts, the defendants left that box unchecked, according to their lawyers, believing the omission would result in the election board not registering them if they were indeed ineligible. Yet they were registered anyway, and now face criminal prosecution for voting.
Fiona Allen
A day before Fontaine’s scheduled hearing, one of those defendants, 40-year-old Fiona Allen, wept outside a Cleveland courtroom when a public defender explained the charges she faced.
She had moved to the U.S. from Jamaica nine years ago. After turning in the voter registration form and receiving her registration, Allen voted in 2020, 2022 and 2023, prosecutors say. The mother of two, including a son in the U.S. Navy, and her husband of 13 years, a naturalized citizen who also is a serviceman, declined to comment at the courthouse. Allen has pleaded not guilty.
Another, 78-year-old Lorinda Miller, appeared before a judge over Zoom last week. She appeared shell-shocked about facing charges.
Her attorney said Miller, who arrived in the U.S. from Canada as a child, is affiliated with an Indigenous tribe that issued her paperwork identifying her as “a citizen of North America.” She was told that was sufficient to allow her to register and vote. She’s even been called for jury duty, said lawyer Reid Yoder.
He plans to take the case to trial after Miller pleaded not guilty to the charges.
“I think the integrity of the vote should be protected, wholeheartedly,” Yoder said. “I think the intent of the law is to punish people who defrauded the system. That is not my client. To really defraud the system, you have to know you’re doing it. My client’s nothing like that. She believes in the sanctity of the vote, which is why she participated. She didn’t know she was doing anything wrong.”
The Ohio cases are just one example of what is true nationally — that the narrative of widespread numbers of immigrants
without the necessary legal documents registering to vote and then voting is simply not backed up by the facts, said Jay Young, senior director of the Voting and Democracy Program for Common Cause.
State voter rolls are cleaned regularly, he said, and the penalties for casting an illegal ballot as a noncitizen are severe: fines, the potential for a prison sentence and deportation.
He said the role of such immigrants and their potential to sway the election “was the most enduring false narrative that we saw throughout this election.” But he also said it served a purpose, to keep the country divided and sow distrust in the election system.
“If your guy doesn’t win or you’re a candidate that doesn’t win, you have an excuse that you can tell yourself to justify it,” he said.
The Fight for $15 movement, which has been rebranded as Fight for a Union
, has been in a decade-long fight for workers’ rights. Now, their work is paying off.
With wages no longer only
a progressive issue, new research
from the advocacy group Economic Employment Law Project revealed that 21 states across the country will implement minimum wage increases beginning on Jan. 1, 2025. This includes some traditionally conservative states like Missouri, Arizona, Illinois, Nebraska, Montana, and Alaska.
Additionally, Oregon and Florida will be adopting wage hikes in July, and Missouri
and Alaska
—states that went to Trump by large margins—passed ballot measures in November to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 and 2027, respectively.
Minimum wages are also improving on the local level, with 88 jurisdictions implementing increases, according to the EELP report.
But it’s still progressive stronghold states that are leading the charge with the highest wage hikes. Washington will have the highest increase at $16.66, with California trailing close behind at $16.50 for most workers. New York will require $16.50 for workers in New York City and $15.50 for employees in other areas of the state.
However, voters of all political views agree
that the minimum wage should be increased.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and it’s otherwise designated in every state that doesn’t apply the federal minimum wage. It was first passed in 2007 and hasn’t increased since 2009—the longest stretch
without an increase since the United States established a federal pay standard in 1938.
Anyone working 40 hours per week at the current federal minimum wage would make just $15,000 a year. This is the federal poverty
level.
While the Democratic Party has reaffirmed its support
for increasing the federal minimum wage, it’s been met with resistance
from some Republicans. Though the GOP stated in its platform guide
that “we’ll keep pushing Congress to increase it to at least $15 for all Americans.”
After President Joe Biden expressed support
for raising the federal minimum wage during an October 2020 debate
, Donald Trump said that increasing the minimum wage would harm businesses.
“He said we have to help our small businesses—by raising the minimum wage? That’s not helping. I think it should be a state option,” he said.
Well, it looks like states are taking it into their own hands after all.
If Congress is unable to act on raising the federal minimum wage, states are stepping up to ensure that workers aren’t forced into poverty and perhaps clearing a path to a more prosperous future for workers.
Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan plans to reinstate controversial family detention centers as part of the upcoming administration’s mass deportation efforts.
Homan told the Washington Post
Thursday that his plans include building “soft tents” to keep families under one roof as they await deportation.
Detention centers have a long history of being inhospitable to humans and offering prison-like facilities to migrants. Homan, however, seemingly blames parents for having children, instead of acknowledging these dangerous conditions.
“Here’s the issue. You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position,” he said.
President Joe Biden closed family detention facilities in 2021 in an attempt to make the immigration system more humane and compassionate. In their place, his administration distributed ankle monitors and traceable cellphones, allowing families to reside in the United States as they awaited deportation hearings.
But after the end of Trump’s Title 42, which allowed for the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants at the border due to COVID-19 concerns, the Biden administration considered bringing back
the facilities.
Homan served as the Obama-era head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he has carried out deportation efforts
over the past three decades. So if anyone recalls the inhumane conditions of these facilities, it should be Homan.
“There’s barbed wire, there are prison guards,” a former volunteer said
of a family detention center in 2007. “There’s counts throughout the day so that people are in their cells for hours of the day, there’s no free movement around the facility, the food was terrible. You know, it’s just a prison.”
Despite supporting these facilities, Homan told the Washington Post that he wants to “show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it.”
Speaking on deportations as a whole, he said, “I don’t see this thing as being sweeps and the military going through neighborhoods.” Instead, it will be a “targeted” campaign aimed at people who have criminal convictions, gang affiliations, or those who are seen as a national security threat.
However, Homan sang a less empathetic tune
during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week, during which he said the goal is for ICE officers and other agencies to assist them in arresting “as many targeted priority aliens as possible.”
When asked about a “target number” for deportations, Homan responded, “The target number is arresting as many people as we can possibly arrest with the resources I have.”
Incoming border czar Tom Homan says he doesn’t know how many people they expect to deport yet, but he’ll need a minimum of 100,000 beds — more than doubling the 40,000 beds ICE is currently funded for — and more ICE agents. “It all depends on the funding I get from the Hill.” pic.twitter.com/CbARoVhGG7
He also claimed that sanctuary cities will force ICE to make sweeping arrests of anyone who is considered undocumented.
“In sanctuary cities, we can’t arrest criminals in a jail because they won’t let us in the jail,” he said. “Which means instead of one agent arresting the bad guy in the jail, we have to send a whole team to the neighborhood.”
He also said that this retaliation will inevitably result in “nonpriority” undocumented immigrants being arrested “because immigration officers aren’t going to be told to walk away from somebody illegal.”
Homan has been coming for sanctuary cities for quite some time, even threatening to send additional law enforcement into cities like Los Angeles
and Chicago
where local law enforcement has been told not to release immigration information to ICE officials.
“If I gotta send twice as many officers to LA because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do,” Homan told Newsmax
in November. “We got a mandate. President Trump is serious about this. I’m serious about it. This is gonna happen with or without you.”
As a Democrat who immersed himself in political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has much in common with many Americans since the election. He’s tuned out.
“People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what is coming and we are just taking some time off.”
Television ratings — and now a new poll — clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload, according to the survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Smaller percentages of Americans are limiting their intake of news about overseas conflicts, the economy or climate change, the poll says. Politics stand out.
Election news on CNN and MSNBC was taking up too much of Sam Gude’s time before the election, said the 47-year-old electrician from Lincoln, Nebraska. “The last thing I want to watch right now is the interregnum,” said Gude, a Democrat and no fan of President-elect Donald Trump
.
Poll finds more Democrats than Republicans stepping away from news
The poll, conducted in early December, found that about 7 in 10 Democrats say they are stepping back from political news. The percentage isn’t as high for Republicans, who have reason to celebrate Trump’s victory. Still, about 6 in 10 Republicans say they’ve felt the need to take some time off too, and the share for independents is similar.
The differences are far starker for the TV networks that have been consumed by political news.
After election night through Dec. 13, the prime-time viewership of MSNBC was an average of 620,000, down 54% from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. For the same time comparison, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%.
At Fox News Channel, a favorite news network for Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13%, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72% of the people watching one of those three cable networks in the evening were watching Fox News, compared to 53% prior to election day.
A post-election slump for fans of the losing candidate is not a new trend for networks that have become heavily identified for a partisan audience. MSNBC had similar issues after Trump was elected in 2016. Same for Fox in 2020, although that was complicated by anger
: many of its viewers were outraged then by the network’s crucial election night call of Arizona for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden
, and sought alternatives.
MSNBC had its own anger issues
after several “Morning Joe” viewers became upset that hosts Joe Scarborough
and Mika Brzezinski
visited Trump shortly after his victory last month. Yet while the show’s ratings are down 35% since Election Day, that’s a smaller drop than the network’s prime-time ratings.
CNN points out that while it has been suffering in the television ratings, its streaming and digital ratings have been consistent.
Will political interest rebound when Trump takes office?
MSNBC can take some solace in history. In previous years, network ratings bounce back
when the depression after an election loss lifts. When a new administration takes office, people who oppose it are frequently looking for a gathering place.
“I’ll be tuning back in once the clown show starts,” Aunallah said. “You have no choice. Whether or not you want to hear it, it’s happening. If you care about your country, you have no choice but to pay attention.”
People watch TV at bar in Milwaukee, Wisc., as Donald Trump speaks on July 18, 2024.
But the ride may not be smooth. MSNBC’s slide is steeper than it was in 2016; and there’s some question about whether Trump opponents will want to be as engaged as they were during his first term. People are also unplugging from cable television in rates that are only getting more rapid, although MSNBC believes it has bucked this trend eating away at audiences before.
The poll indicates that Americans want less talk about politics from public figures in general. After an election season where endorsements from celebrities like Taylor Swift
made headlines, the survey found that Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of celebrities, large companies and professional athletes speaking out about politics.
Still, Gude is among those discovering other ways to get news to which he does want to pay attention, including on YouTube.
Advice for networks who want to see the viewers return
Some of the Americans who have turned away from political news lately also had some advice for getting them engaged again.
Gude said, for example, that MSNBC will always have a hard-core audience of Trump haters. But if the network wants to expand its audience, “then you have to talk about issues, and you have to stop talking about Trump.”
Kathleen Kendrick, a 36-year-old sales rep from Grand Junction, Colorado, who’s a registered independent voter, said she hears plenty of people loudly spouting off about their political opinions on the job. She wants more depth when she watches the news. Much of what she sees is one-sided and shallow, she said.
“You get a story but only part of a story,” Kendrick said. “It would be nice if you could get both sides, and more research.”
Aunallah, similarly, is looking for more depth and variety. He’s not interested “in watching the angry man on the corner yelling at me anymore,” he said.
“It’s kind of their own fault that I’m not watching,” he said. “I felt they spent all this time talking about the election. They made it so much of their focus that when the main event ends, why would people want to keep watching?”
The poll of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
