A Franklin County judge accused Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost of turning a Brazilian woman who legally immigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago into a “political prop” when Yost charged her with voting illegally in the 2018 general election.
Common Pleas Judge Chris Brown on Thursday called the timing “fishy” of the prosecution of Maria Dearaujo, who was 62 when Yost brought charges against her six years after she allegedly voted illegally as a non-citizen with permanent legal residency in the United States.
About two weeks before Election Day in 2024, Yost, a Republican, held a press conference to announce indictments against six immigrants for illegal voting in Ohio, including Dearaujo. All are present in the country with proper paperwork, often referred to as a “green card.” The six weren’t accused of any kind of fraud or intentional election subversion, only that they voted in the past despite a lack of citizenship. Some of them said in court filings that they were told at the BMV that they could vote or that they represented themselves as non-citizens when they registered.
Yost has said this is legally irrelevant – all that matters is whether or not they voted.
Illegal voting is a fourth-degree felony, punishable by six to 18 months in prison and up to $5,000 in fines. And, according to the Migration Policy Institute, it can trigger immigration consequences, including deportations.
Brown, a Democrat, indicated suspicion about the timing of the accusation and the context of President Donald Trump’s false claims of “millions” of noncitizens voting to swing elections for Democrats. State audits, plus nonprofits aligned with both liberals and conservatives, have found noncitizen voting is an extraordinarily rare occurrence, on the scale of dozens of cases over the past few decades.
“At some point, doesn’t due process protect someone like Ms. Dearaujo from being used as a political prop?” Brown asked.
‘Dead for two years?’
Cynthia Ellison, an attorney representing Yost’s office, told Brown she was “not comfortable” answering the question. A spokeswoman for Yost, who was running for governor until last week against another Republican who was endorsed by Trump, didn’t respond to inquiries about Brown’s comments.
The illegal voting cases have gone poorly for Yost thus far. He at first accused seven people of illegal voting, though a grand jury declined to indict an Oberlin College student who Yost claimed had voted in both Ohio and Washington state in 2018.
Another of the accused, a 68-year-old man named Ramesh Patel, was dead for about two years before Yost indicted him. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley brought attention to the apparent oversight from Yost (who subsequently dropped the case), calling the indictment of a dead man “one of the greatest examples of prosecutorial overreach I have ever witnessed.”
On Thursday, Brown asked Ellison to confirm that Yost brought the case even though Patel had been “dead for two years.” She said she didn’t have any information about it on hand.
78-year-old Canadian woman living in Hudson indicted
The oldest person Yost indicted was a 78-year-old Canadian woman living in Hudson, Ohio named Lorinda Miller, who has lived here since she was 12. She entered a guilty plea for illegal voting after she was booked, fingerprinted and photographed at the Summit County Jail.
However, Summit County Common Pleas Judge Kelly McLaughlin in April instead allowed her to enter an intervention in lieu of conviction program, based on what her attorney, J. Reid Yoder, referred to as a “legal fiction” that she was cognitively impaired at the time of the crime. While this agreement allows her to avoid incarceration and get the charge against her dismissed, Yoder said Miller is now deeply afraid of deportation given her guilty plea. That would mean physical separation from her husband of 25 years and leaving her country of residence of nearly 70 years to an uncertain fate.
“At her age, it is so alarming for her that something like this could happen to her,” he said about the possibility of deportation. “It’s almost a death sentence for her. And the other thing: what do they do? Do they take her into custody? Hold her until she has the right to a deportation hearing?”
Another case is pending against Van Thuy Cooper, who was brought to the United States in the 1970s from Vietnam by her parents. She said in court filings she believed she became naturalized when her mother did. She registered to vote in 2016. In 2020 she received notice from the secretary of state telling her she was not legally permitted to register or vote and directing her to cancel her voter registration, which she did. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Franklin County prosecutor’s office declined to seek an indictment against her in the Spring of 2022. Like Dearaujo, she was indicted after years of unexplained delay.
She and a man accused of illegal voting, Ahmed Aden, await trial and have pleaded not guilty.
Nicholas Fontaine, a sheet metal worker from Akron who was 32 at the time of his indictment, moved to the United States from Canada when he was two. He told the Associated Press that a Department of Homeland Security official visited him at his home in either 2018 or 2019 and alerted him to the fact that his votes in the 2016 and 2018 elections had been illegal and warned him not to vote again. Since then, he has not voted. He too awaits trial.
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‘Doesn’t that just seem a little fishy?’
Dearaujo appeared in court Thursday afternoon to argue that Yost violated her constitutional right to a speedy trial.
Both sides agreed on some basic facts: Dearaujo complied with a written directive from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose in 2020 stating that she may have voted illegally and must cancel her voter registration, which did not identify her as a citizen. BCI, which Yost oversees, closed its investigation into Dearaujo in April 2021 given there’s no evidence she lied about her immigration status. The Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office declined to present the case to a grand jury. And nothing came of it until October 2024.
A “cynical person,” Brown said, could say that Yost waited to announce the prosecution of Dearaujo until early voting had already started in 2024 to align with President Donald Trump’s “lies about rampant voter fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.
“Doesn’t that just seem a little fishy, the timing of this?” he asked Ellison, from Yost’s office. “Couldn’t a person conclude that it was timed specifically to undermine confidence in the vote?”
Ellison said she was “not comfortable answering that question.” She gave a similar answer when Brown accused Yost of turning Dearaujo into a “political prop.”
Brown didn’t rule on Dearaujo’s motion to dismiss the case, saying he’d issue a written order in the coming weeks.
Dearaujo declined an interview before her hearing, saying she’d rather not be in the news. Court filings indicate she moved to the United States from Brazil more than 30 years ago. Her family lives in the United States. She works full time and has taken time off to appear for her court hearings.