Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach says his office is now pursuing four criminal cases built on a ten-month investigation into noncitizen voting, part of a years-long push by the Republican official to prove the state has a fraud problem at the ballot box.

According to reports, three defendants have been named so far. Jose Luis Gomez Sr. Was charged in Reno County and Edwin Francisco Ramirez-Guerra in Sedgwick County, both in December 2025. A third case followed in June, when prosecutors filed voter-fraud charges against Mariana Alexandra Dewey, also in Sedgwick County. Dewey reportedly faces a separate federal indictment filed this September. Some of the individuals flagged by Kobach and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, per those reports, are legal permanent residents, not undocumented immigrants.

This isn't Kobach's first run at this. The most prominent recent case out of Kansas involves Jose Ceballos, the former mayor of Coldwater, first elected in 2021 as a registered Republican. Ceballos was accused of voting in elections while not a U.S. Citizen and now faces potential deportation as a result.

The numbers don't quite line up

President Trump and Republican officials nationally have spent years arguing that noncitizen voting is common enough to swing elections, and several states have responded with voter ID laws or new registration checks. Kansas itself tried to pass one of the toughest voter ID laws in the country. A federal court struck it down, with the judge finding no credible evidence of noncitizens registering in any meaningful numbers.

That gap between the political rhetoric and the research keeps showing up. The Brennan Center for Justice, which has tracked fraud allegations for years, calls noncitizen voting "vanishingly rare" and found only around 30 suspected cases out of 23.5 million votes cast across 42 jurisdictions in 2016. The Heritage Foundation, hardly a soft touch on this issue, counted just 23 confirmed instances between 2003 and 2022.

The Department of Homeland Security tells a different story. A DHS spokesperson told Newsweek that the department's SAVE system has flagged more than 24,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls since April 2025, after what the agency describes as an overhaul that has processed over 60 million voter verification queries. The spokesperson said USCIS is "committed to helping eliminate voter fraud and restore trust in America's elections by ensuring only U.S. Citizens vote."

None of the Kansas defendants have been convicted, and the charges remain allegations at this stage. Whether Kobach's four cases hold up in court, or whether they end up feeding the same disputed data war between DHS and watchdog groups, is the thing to watch as these prosecutions move through Kansas courts over the coming months.