Tupe Smith didn’t even want to vote in the Whittier school board election, let alone run in it.
Smith moved to the remote Alaskan village in 2017 to be close to her husband’s extended family. Accessible only by single-lane, 2.5 mile tunnel or boat, Whittier is known as the “town under one roof,” where nearly all of the 270 residents live in a single 14-story tower, many rarely leaving for weeks on end during the long, dark winters that dump more than 20 feet of snow every year.
It’s a surprising place to find so many American Samoans like Smith — she’s one of roughly 70 who hail from the tropical island more than 5,000 miles away.
But Smith made a home in frigid Whittier, volunteering at the lone school before her kids were even born. She was so beloved by her neighbors in this tightest of communities that they practically begged her to join the school board. After all, with nearly half of kids in school being Samoan, it made sense to have at least one on the board. Reluctantly, she agreed, and in 2023 she won her seat with 96 percent of the ballots cast, including her own.
That’s why, a few weeks later, two Alaska State Troopers knocked on Smith’s door, arrested her in front of her children, and marched her out of the building in handcuffs. After a two-hour drive, she was processed at a state prison — mug shot taken, strip searched, prison uniform issued — and held until her husband could finally make it there that evening to post bail.
Alaska charged Smith with first degree voter misconduct. As an American Samoan, Smith is a “non-citizen U.S. national,” — a status somewhere between citizen and permanent legal resident that’s so little-known that Samoans often have trouble filling out government forms because it’s rarely listed as an option.
As non-citizen U.S. nationals, American Samoans can do just about anything else U.S. citizens can — they hold U.S. passports, work and travel in the U.S. without a visa — but they aren’t allowed to vote in most places outside American Samoa. Election officials in Whittier didn’t know that when they told Smith to check “U.S. citizen” on her registration, or when they didn’t stop her from voting on election day.
And so, for the crime of agreeing to help out more at her kids’ school, Smith now faces five years imprisonment. “They’re just this amazing family, amazing individuals,” said Neil Weare, her attorney and co-founder of Right to Democracy, an advocacy organization for U.S. territories. “It’s Kafkaesque.”
Smith’s case is unusual. But in using one voter’s innocent mistake to spread fear about voting,
it’s far from unique.
In the past year, attorneys general in Texas, Idaho and Iowa have announced felony charges against ineligible voters. U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump have filed indictments in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida against people who voted when they weren’t allowed to. And secretaries of state have combed through voter registration rolls in Louisiana, Ohio, and Georgia, referring hundreds of people to prosecutors to investigate whether they violated voting rules.
In April, ten other American Samoans in Whittier — including Smith’s husband, a volunteer firefighter — were charged with voter fraud and perjury, punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. That’s a charge normally reserved for lying under oath in a courtroom. But here, those charged were accused of mistakenly checking a box on a voter registration form.
“It’s a big problem,” said Benjamin Plener Cover, a law professor at the University of Idaho who has written about voter fraud. “Outside of the context of voting, I think people understand the difference between fraud and mistake. People understand those are two very different things, and they should be treated in a very different way.”
These charges and investigations come as President Donald Trump and his allies push baseless conspiracies about non-naturalized immigrants voting in vast numbers to sway elections to Democrats. The illusory threat of noncitizen voting was a centerpiece of the GOP’s 2024 campaign messaging. And now in power, Republicans are hunting evidence to justify the fearmongering and bolster their push for more restrictions.
“It’s usually not the case that somebody is intentionally trying to register or vote while ineligible,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC). “But making these big announcements contributes to the narrative that the president and his allies and a lot of these state and local officials are trying to build — that our elections are somehow inherently untrustworthy, or that they are corrupted by wide scale fraud or illegal voting.”
The crackdown also has another impact: to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty around the voting process, likely dissuading some eligible voters from trying to cast a ballot at all.
Whereas past incidents of ineligible registration or voting were treated with a slap on the wrist, GOP state and federal officials have increasingly taken a different approach. They have turned to laws designed to prevent knowingly fraudulent activity — casting multiple ballots, for instance, or voting under another person’s name, to charge confused U.S. nationals, legal immigrants, and ex-felons with voter fraud, perjury, or other felonies.
These cases are often announced to great fanfare, which is the point, said Walter Olsen, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. The goal for Trump and his allies, Olsen said, is “showing the flank [that] they want to pursue prosecutions that will keep this in the news.”
Olsen investigated whether ineligible voters, particularly immigrants, could be casting ballots in large enough numbers to sway an election. “The answer, quite overwhelming and consistent, is no — it’s not anywhere close to the level that is changing the outcome of any federal race,” Olsen said.
Other researchers have found the same, even those who argue that noncitizen voting is a legitimate concern. An election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation shows just 98 prosecuted cases of ineligible alien voting and 248 cases of ineligible felon voting since 1982.
“It’s not really about election integrity, like they claim it is,” Diaz said. “It’s not really about keeping voter rolls clean. It’s about scaring people. It’s about deterring people from voting. It’s about pushing this narrative of voter fraud without any evidence. It’s about scoring political points.”
‘We are treating mistakes like fraud’:
When Republican officials broadcast that they’ve found noncitizens on the rolls, or file indictments for voter fraud, they generate the kind of headlines that have driven half of Americans to worry about noncitizen voting. But when those claims later turn out to be overblown, there’s rarely a press conference or an apology for upending lives or putting the acquitted at risk of deportation.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) announced the arrest of a non-citizen for illegal voting just weeks before the 2024 election and just days after Trump claimed during a presidential debate that, “our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”
That man was acquitted by a jury earlier this month.
On Tuesday, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) announced 78 potential noncitizen registrations. LaRose credited access to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases pursuant to an executive order signed by Trump in March.
“My office has a zero-tolerance policy for election crime in Ohio, and I’m hopeful that our prosecutors will as well,” LaRose said. “Even one illegal vote can spoil the outcome of an election.”
But despite the flashy announcement and high-flown rhetoric about the sanctity of elections, Ohio’s story appears to teach a very different lesson: that illegal voting is extremely rare.
Last year, LaRose similarly trumpeted that he was referring over 600 potential illegal voting cases to prosecutors. Those led to just nine indictments — one against a Canadian who moved to Ohio when he was two.
As a legal permanent resident, Nicholas Fontaine had to sign up for the Selective Service. “I think in my young teenage brain, I thought, ‘Well, I have to sign up for the draft, I should be able to vote,’” he told the AP, describing why he agreed to register.
Attorney General Dave Yost (R) stressed that Ohio law treats illegal voting as a strict liability offense — meaning the alleged perpetrator’s intent doesn’t factor in. But Yost suggested that he saw LaRose’s referrals as overkill.
“I’m thinking that I don’t really want to pull people off of officer-involved critical incident investigations, child rapists, murderers to be chasing voter registration cases for past elections,” he told the Ohio Capital Journal.
Even if all 600 referrals were legit, Yost noted, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any election in Ohio. “I think this should enable everybody to take a deep breath and be more confident that our elections are, in fact, safe and secure, and the noncitizens are not going to vote,” Yost said.
Louisiana has had a similar experience. In August, Secretary of State Mary Landry (R) announced the results of a voter roll audit going back to the 1980s that used the DHS database. Her office found 390 non-citizens registered and 79 potential incidents of ineligible voting.
According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, that means there were perhaps 79 improper ballots out of 74 million votes cast over years, which translates to roughly 1 ineligible vote per million.
Landry’s announcement only noted potential cases of eligible voting, meaning the actual number of noncitizens registered or voting could be much lower. When asked to provide an update on those investigations, a spokesman declined to comment.
“We are treating mistakes like fraud and that’s leading to really harsh punishment for people who were acting in good faith,” said Cover. “There’s a concern it might have a chilling effect on eligible voters.
“And I also think that it contributes to this false narrative of widespread voter fraud and actually unnecessarily undermines our confidence in the electoral system,” he added.
Unlike Ohio, most states’ voter fraud statutes include a mens rea element — the ineligible person had to intentionally or knowingly decide to vote illegally. But even in those states, Republican officials are opting to bring more aggressive charges.
In August, Idaho Sec. of State Phil McGrane (R) announced prosecutors brought felony indictments against one noncitizen for “fraudulently” voting, rather than misdemeanor charges for attempting to vote when not qualified. The misdemeanor statute specifically states it is illegal for any “alien” to vote, suggesting it’s the more appropriate charge to bring against a noncitizen who voted. The felony statute, by contrast, doesn’t single out aliens.
In Alaska, Tupe Smith’s case is ongoing, having made its way to the state Court of Appeals on an interlocutory petition. Under Attorney General Treg Taylor (R) — who recently stepped down to run for governor — the state argued that when Smith “knowingly” checked she was a U.S. citizen on her voter registration form, as election officials told her to, it amounted to “intentionally” lying about her citizenship. A decision remains pending.
At the press conference touting the audit, Landry had to admit that voter fraud is “not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” while insisting that even one ineligible vote could change an election outcome.
But, so far, that worry remains purely hypothetical. In the mean time, prosecutions of good-faith mistakes continue to create fear around voting, and build a false narrative that voter fraud is rampant.
“All of these really aggressive criminal efforts are a two- pronged strategy,” said Diaz, of CLC. “One, it’s supposed to scare people from participating in the process. And two, it’s their search for some justification to restrict access to the ballot.”
“The ultimate goal of these really aggressive investigations and prosecutions is to deter people from participating in the process at all,” he added.