By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-08-14 13:11:59 | Updated at 2026-08-14 14:15:42
1 hour ago
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Thursday announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in the 2024 general election and one U.S. citizen accused of registering her noncitizen spouse to vote.
The charges follow a state review of 38 suspected cases of noncitizen voting or related conduct from 2009 to 2025.
“In my office, we’ve always taken election crimes seriously, and prosecute attacks on our voting systems to the fullest extent of the law,” Nessel said in an Aug. 13 statement.
“These charges reflect the severity of the allegations, the sanctity of our democracy, and the tremendous consequences of voting illegally—whether that’s done to try and ‘test’ security measures or to make an unlawful vote count.”
The Michigan attorney general, a Democrat, charged six people with election-related crimes.
These included Kimberley DiDonato, 60, who is charged with election forgery and using a computer to commit a crime; both are felonies.
In the statement, the Attorney General’s Office alleged that DiDonato, posing as her noncitizen husband, falsely claimed he was an American citizen, provided her husband’s identifying information, and registered him to vote online in April 2024.
Upon receiving a voter registration card in her husband’s name, DiDonato contacted her local clerk to cancel the registration in May of that year, the statement further alleged.
DiDonato claimed her intent was to test the registration system for vulnerabilities to unqualified voter registrants, according to the statement.
Alondra Harker, 26, a limited-term alien resident, though not an American citizen and therefore ineligible to vote in any state and federal elections, faces a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voter registration.
Harumi Michael, 60, a lawful permanent resident, though not an American citizen, is charged with two felony counts of election forgery, one felony count of an unqualified person attempting to vote, and a misdemeanor count of making a false statement upon voter registration.
Michael Akioya, 39, a lawful permanent resident, though not an American citizen, faces two misdemeanor counts of making false statements on absentee ballot paperwork.
Robert Piva, 67, also a lawful permanent resident, faces felony charges of election perjury and an unqualified person attempting to vote, plus a misdemeanor count of fraudulent registration.
Basanth Sadasivian, 29, who lives in the UK, is charged with a felony count of an unqualified person attempting to vote.
It is alleged that Sadasivian registered to vote in 2024 by email via the Federal Post Card Application system, using a local address, and voted under that same federal system in the 2024 general election. Sadasivian is charged with one count of Election Law.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that tightened citizen verification requirements for voter registration. The order also directed federal officials to take steps to ensure that illegal immigrants and noncitizens do not vote in federal elections.
However, parts of the order are blocked.
A federal judge in Boston on Aug. 11 expanded a court-ordered block to tighten mail-in voting rules ahead of the midterm elections, banning the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out the president’s directives nationwide.
“While the question of whether any given resident is a citizen may feel simple, some cases are nuanced in unexpected ways,” Nessel said.
She said that the federal government “has not always provided easy or open access to certain necessary citizenship records, and so our investigators had to spend considerable time and effort coaxing cooperation from the federal agencies.”
“These delays contributed significantly to our timeline for review,” she added.
The Epoch Times has contacted lawyers for Akioya and Harker for comment. It was not immediately clear whether the other four had legal representatives who could comment on their behalf.
Jill McLaughlin contributed to this report.
