A Honduran national living in California falsely claimed U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
Darwin Jonathan Rivera Flores, 30, of Winnetka, California, is not a U.S. citizen. Federal prosecutors say he registered to vote in California by falsely declaring himself an American citizen. He was arrested Friday morning on two felony charges.
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced the arrest personally and did not mince words. “Because states like California allow non-citizens to easily register to vote and receive a ballot by mail, there is no telling how many non-citizens are currently registered,” Essayli said.
That statement, from the man responsible for enforcing federal election law in California, is significant. He is not saying fraud might exist. He is saying the scale of it cannot be determined, because California’s systems have made verification from the outside functionally impossible.
As originally reported, the Rivera Flores arrest arrives in the same week Virginia identified 6,531 admitted noncitizens on its voter rolls, and Alaska sent verification letters to 3,000 suspicious registrations. The Justice Department had already documented a pattern of noncitizen voter fraud cases across multiple states.
California uses automatic motor voter registration, the same system that a New Jersey case confirmed can place noncitizens on rolls without meaningful verification. The state has aggressively resisted federal efforts to audit its voter rolls. Its attorney general is in court opposing a USPS mail ballot tracking requirement. Governor Newsom this month signed a law named after a journalist who has been reporting on the state’s election fraud problems.
The SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, passed the House. The Senate has not acted. An Obama-appointed federal judge in Boston has blocked the mail ballot verification order twice. Meanwhile, the DOJ has announced 1,000 election monitors deploying ahead of November.
Rivera Flores faces two felony counts. Essayli’s public statement makes clear that his case may be one visible data point in a problem whose total size nobody in federal law enforcement can currently quantify, specifically because California has blocked the tools that would allow them to find out.
Democrats have long dismissed concerns about noncitizen voter registration as a fringe conspiracy theory. The sitting U.S. Attorney for California is now saying publicly that the state’s own systems make the problem easy to exploit and nearly impossible to measure from the outside.
Congress returns September 8. The SAVE America Act is waiting. Sixty-five days remain before the November election.