Robert Harold Corbett was sure he was an American citizen until federal agents showed up at his door with an arrest warrant earlier this month.
Corbett was born in Canada, but raised in the United States, he told reporters outside a federal courthouse in Raleigh, N.C.
“I did not find out I was adopted until I was 51 years old,” said Corbett, who has been charged with one count of falsely claiming citizenship to vote and one count of voting by an alien. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says he voted in six elections since 1998.
Corbett is among at least 11 Canadians who have been caught up in a crackdown on non-citizen voting by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa drew a direct connection between those prosecutions and what it described as Canadian interference in American politics.
In a statement, the embassy accused Canadian politicians of openly attempting to influence the U.S. election through trade policy, political campaigning and public remarks. It also singled out Canadians for illegally voting, claiming Canada has the second-highest number of its citizens facing fraudulent or illegal voting charges of any country.
“All Canadians should refrain from attempting to participate in or influence U.S. elections in any way. Americans decide America’s elections,” said the statement, which comes amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Canada over tariffs and trade.
Since late last year, federal prosecutors have charged dozens of non-citizens, many of them longtime U.S. permanent residents, with illegally voting in federal elections. But several of those accused say they didn’t know they were breaking the law, with some saying they didn’t even know they were registered to vote.
Investigations have consistently found that illegal voting by non-citizens is highly uncommon, says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“This is likely an attempt to sow doubt about the elections in advance of an election in which the president and his administration might fear the voters might reject them,” Becker said.
A Reuters investigation published in September found that software glitches and clerical errors across a dozen states could have added more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens to voter rolls since 2000.
Becker says the DOJ has an “election crimes manual” that cautions prosecutors against taking enforcement actions close to elections because of the potential to influence voters.
“There’s no reason these arrests couldn’t have been made on Nov. 4 or some time after,” he said.
Aaron Cohen, a Florida criminal defence lawyer who represents several non-citizens facing voting-related charges, says some of the confusion among his clients stems from election officials failing to properly verify eligibility when registering voters.
“I feel strongly that it’s a policy decision for whatever policy outcomes are that the current administration is seeking,” Cohen said of the U.S. efforts to prosecute non-citizens for voter fraud.
Lawyers who spoke with CBC News said U.S. voter registration systems can sometimes catch non-citizens up in errors, and one of them says he has seen an uptick in non-citizens being questioned last month.
Handcuffs, prison time
The DOJ’s news release including information about Corbett’s arrest features images of people handcuffed with their arms being held by police officers and faces blurred.
A video posted by the department on X Tuesday features a COPS-style montage of masked officers and a man in pajamas being led down a brightly lit hallway, advertising the arrests of 28 people in Californian for non-citizen voting. Two Canadians were among them.
Corbett told WRAL, a North Carolina NBC affiliate broadcaster, that he spent the night in a crowded and dirty jail cell with “people peeing on the floors.” He said he was certain he was a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.
Paige Adamson, a Canadian citizen who has lived in Point Roberts, Wash., as a U.S. permanent resident for 14 years, was accused by U.S. border agents of illegally voting and questioned for several hours in September, CBC previously reported.
Adamson, who was heading back to the States after a birthday dinner in British Columbia, was told the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) believes she falsely claimed she was a U.S. citizen in order to vote in Washington state.
The department also alleged Adamson voted in Washington state’s 2018 general election and cited those allegations as grounds for removing Adamson from the U.S. Adamson says she has no memories of ever voting in the U.S.
A North Carolina Election Integrity Team sign in Spanish, seen Oct. 25, 2024, in Durham, N.C., warns non-citizens not to vote and that doing so could lead to deportation — a notice that advocacy groups say could intimidate legitimate voters who speak Spanish. (Jonathan Drake/Reuters)
The consequences for the accusations can be serious. The Trump administration has sought to deport non-citizens convicted of voting illegally and in June, another North Carolina-based Canadian, Denis Bouchard, was sentenced to two months in federal prison.
Others have successfully challenged their charges. In August, a federal judge in Florida acquitted Gaynell Jeffries, a Canadian citizen accused of illegally voting, after she argued that an election official had mistakenly told her permanent residents were eligible to cast ballots.
Broader implications for democracy
Frédérick Gagnon, a political science professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and the head of the university’s Observatory on the U.S., says the prosecutions in the U.S. are unfolding under a climate of fear and uncertainty for immigrants and other non-citizens living there.
“People are worried about profiling. They’re worried of getting arrested and we can see that ICE wants to operate so quickly that sometimes they’re proceeding with arrests that aren’t justified,” Gagnon said.
He said Trump’s repeated allegations of widespread voter fraud also serve a political purpose by mobilizing his supporters.
Both Becker and Gagnon see no indication Canadians in particular are being singled out.
“They’re looking at anybody they can possibly find because they are desperate to make the lie of widespread non-citizen voting look a little better,” Becker said.
