An immigrant from the Bahamas has been voting illegally in North Carolina for nearly two decades, federal prosecutors said Monday, including casting ballots in repeated Democratic primaries and in the 2020 presidential election.
Garbart Piquant also used a U.S. passport based on a Virginia birth certificate that was faked, the U.S. Attorney’s office said. And he applied for a REAL ID-compliant identification in North Carolina, also claiming he was a citizen, the government said.
It is the latest in a series of cases involving noncitizens who managed to register and vote in North Carolina.
Mr. Piquant remained active in the state’s election records Monday, according to records that listed all the same details but with a slightly different first name of “Gabart.”
Those records show he signed up in 2005 and has been voting in Wake County as far back as 2006.
He cast ballots in that year’s general election and again in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2020. He also voted in Democratic Party primaries in 2008, 2014, 2016 and 2020. He never voted in a GOP primary.
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He cast ballots in person, either on Election Day or early, until 2020, when he cast a mail ballot, according to state records.
Federal prosecutors in North Carolina have been particularly active in trying to sniff out illegal voting by noncitizens, with 19 people charged just before last year’s election and in 2018 brought charges against 18 others.
In both sets of previous cases, the majority of voters who showed a party affiliation, either through declaration or through voting in primaries, sided with Democrats.
North Carolina has made progress in scraping the names from its rolls.
When The Washington Times checked last year, about a half dozen of the names exposed in 2018 were still on the voting rolls.
But as of this week, they have all been deactivated. And of the 19 people charged last year, all have now been removed from voting rolls.
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The cases often share details, such as claims that local officials either encouraged or didn’t discourage the immigrants from registering to vote.
Mr. Piquant’s case is different in that the subterfuge, as described by prosecutors, seems intentional.
Authorities sniffed him out after he applied to renew a passport in 2014 and the State Department decided to verify his identity.
Records checks showed the Virginia birth certificate he used was bogus, and investigators found a real birth record in the Bahamas, the Justice Department said. They also discovered Mr. Piquant’s brother had previously applied for him to become a legal permanent resident — which wouldn’t have been necessary had he been born in Virginia and had citizenship from birth.
Voting in federal elections remains a right only for citizens, though several jurisdictions, including New York City this month, have decided to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
Mr. Piquant has been charged by a grand jury with 10 counts spanning passport fraud, voting by an alien and false claims of citizenship to register to vote.
North Carolina’s problem with signing up ineligible voters has been known for years.
In 2014, the state ran the names of illegal immigrant “Dreamers” who had been approved for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals deportation amnesty and found 109 out of about 15,000 total state DACA residents were registered to vote.
A 2014 study by Jesse R. Richman, a political scientist at Old Dominion University, argued that noncitizen voting in North Carolina probably accounted for Barack Obama’s win in the state in the 2008 election over Republican John McCain.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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