A federal grand jury has indicted a 39-year-old Indian national on two counts for allegedly lying about his citizenship to cast a ballot in Minnesota's 2024 general election, a case that lands squarely in a debate Democrats have long tried to shut down.
Mukeshkumar Somabhai Chaudhari signed a voter signature certificate required under Minnesota law, swore he was a U.S. citizen, and voted on November 5, 2024. He is not a citizen. The Department of Justice announced the indictment earlier this month, and if convicted, Chaudhari faces up to five years in prison on each of the two federal counts.
The case is the latest in a growing string of federal prosecutions that undercut a familiar progressive talking point: that noncitizen voting essentially never happens and that anyone who raises the issue is trafficking in conspiracy theories. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who heads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said in a press release that the department intends to keep pressing the matter.
"The right to vote is a sacred privilege of American citizenship, and every lawful voter deserves an election system in which that right is protected. The Department will hold accountable those who knowingly make false claims of citizenship in order to vote. The integrity of our elections depends on ensuring that only eligible citizens cast ballots and that every lawful vote is counted."
Dhillon also posted on X that the Justice Department has now "indicted or convicted 67 individuals for election related crimes." That figure represents a federal enforcement posture that barely existed a few years ago, and one that election-integrity advocates say vindicates years of warnings.
Fox News Digital had previously reported earlier this year that Chaudhari was already facing state-level perjury and voting violation charges before the federal indictment came down. When authorities first questioned him, he denied voting at all. He later reversed course, admitted he had cast a ballot, and told investigators he "made a mistake."
His explanation: he said he did not learn he should not have voted until his lawyer told him during his green card process. Chaudhari reportedly received a voter registration notice from the state of Minnesota, likely triggered after he obtained his driver's license. That sequence, get a license, get a registration notice, show up and vote, raises an obvious question about how many safeguards Minnesota's system actually provides before a noncitizen walks into a polling place and signs a form.
The Minnesota Secretary of State's office told Fox News Digital earlier this year that "only U.S. Citizens are eligible to vote in Minnesota" and that applicants must attest to their eligibility, including citizenship, when they register. Voters must swear to their eligibility again before casting a ballot. The office insisted that if a noncitizen attempts to vote, "they will be caught and held to account."
The office called ineligible voting "extremely rare." But "extremely rare" and "never happens" are different claims, and the Chaudhari indictment is one more data point suggesting the system catches these cases only after the ballot has already been cast and counted, not before.
Bill Glahn of the Center for the American Experiment had previously raised concerns about Minnesota's voting procedures in an interview with Fox News Digital. One policy he flagged: Minnesota allows a registered voter to "vouch" for up to eight other voters' residency for same-day voter registration without an ID. That is a remarkably loose standard for a state that insists its safeguards are airtight.
Glahn responded to the Chaudhari indictment on X with four words: "That thing that never happens." The sarcasm landed because it captured the gap between what election-integrity skeptics have been told for years and what federal prosecutors keep finding when they look. A recent DOJ crackdown on noncitizen voter fraud has produced arrests and charges in multiple states, each one a case that was not supposed to exist.
Political commentator Eric Daugherty was more direct, posting on X: "Tim Walz's Minnesota is a hotbed for fraud!" Whether or not that characterization is fair to the entire state, the Chaudhari case, combined with the vouching policy and the driver's-license-to-registration pipeline, suggests Minnesota's election infrastructure has gaps that state officials have been slow to acknowledge.
Chad Ennis, vice president of the Honest Elections Project, spoke to Fox News Digital about the indictment and framed it as part of a pattern that progressives have spent years denying.
"Once again, DOJ is proving that if you look for election fraud, you find election fraud. The left loves to claim election fraud does not happen. But here we have yet another instance of a noncitizen illegally registering to vote."
Ennis's point is straightforward: the volume of cases tracks with the level of effort. For years, federal enforcement of noncitizen voting laws was minimal. Now that the DOJ is actively investigating, it keeps finding violations. Sixty-seven indictments or convictions is not a rounding error. It is a caseload, and it was built in a relatively short window. The FBI has brought its own illegal-voting charges as well, and the response from some quarters has been to mock the numbers rather than reckon with what they represent.
The penalties Chaudhari faces extend well beyond prison time. The Minnesota Secretary of State's office noted that voting while ineligible can result in deportation, a permanent bar on future citizenship, a fine of up to $10,000, and up to five years in prison. For a man in the middle of a green card process, a federal conviction would almost certainly end any path to legal status in the United States.
The federal indictment confirmed by Just The News lays out the same core facts: Chaudhari signed the voter certificate, cast the ballot, and now faces two counts carrying up to five years each. The case is not ambiguous. A noncitizen voted in a federal election. The only question is whether he did so knowingly, and prosecutors, by bringing the indictment, are signaling they believe the evidence supports that charge.
Several open questions remain. The specific federal court where the indictment was filed has not been publicly identified in available reporting. The current status of Chaudhari's earlier state-level charges, whether they are still pending, have been dismissed, or have been folded into the federal case, is unclear. And the basis for the claim that his voter registration was "likely triggered" by his driver's license has not been attributed to a specific investigative finding.
Meanwhile, the broader picture keeps getting harder for election-integrity skeptics to wave away. DHS has identified hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls across the country, and states from New Jersey to California have been forced to confront the problem after years of dismissing it.
Every one of these cases started the same way: someone said it could not happen, and then it did. The only thing rarer than noncitizen voting, it turns out, is a Democrat willing to admit it is a problem worth solving.