By Tom Davies ,Indiana Capital Chronicle

State officials say a federal agency review found 21 noncitizens have cast ballots in Indiana elections, along with 165 noncitizens who registered to vote in the state.

Those figures were included in an announcement Wednesday from the offices of Attorney General Todd Rokita and Secretary of State Diego Morales about the settlement of a lawsuit in which they sought to force the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to verify the citizenship of more than 585,000 registered Hoosier voters. 

It was not clear how many of those voter registrations had been reviewed by the federal agency and when the illegal voting was alleged to have occurred.

In 2024, Indiana had 4.8 million registered voters and just under 3 million, or 62%, voted in that year’s general election. The Hoosier state has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country.

Rokita and Morales, both Republicans, filed the lawsuit in April, seeking to force federal review of the voter list after the agency did not do so during then-President Joe Biden’s administration when first requested in October 2024 — just weeks before that year’s presidential election.

Rokita said in a statement that the settlement “delivers the federal access we’re entitled to under law, allowing the Secretary of State to swiftly remove ineligible voters from the rolls and fortify our system against future risks.”

“From day one, many individuals dismissed our work as a ‘witch hunt’ — but the facts speak for themselves: non-citizen voting is real here in our state, and even one illegal ballot undermines the trust we are told to have in our election processes and even the Republic itself,” Rokita said.

Rokita’s office did not answer questions from the Indiana Capital Chronicle about how it had confirmed the instances of noncitizens registering to vote and casting ballots — and whether any legal action against those people was being sought.

The announcement said the ballots had been wrongly cast in “recent elections” but did not provide additional information.

Morales spokeswoman Lindsey Eaton said the review “includes voters in 2024 and past elections. It’s based on statewide voter history.”

It is illegal under both Indiana and federal law for noncitizens to vote in elections.

Actions criticized as voter intimidation

Voting-rights advocates previously denounced as attempted voter intimidation the request from Rokita and Morales for review of the nearly 600,000 registrations by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which is housed within the homeland security agency.

The Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, which is representing several Indiana groups in legal challenges to state election law changes, criticized the actions by Rokita and Morales.

“Hoosiers who have become U.S. citizens are needlessly harmed by these efforts. This preliminary information from USCIS has not been verified,” the organization said.

Eaton said the secretary of state’s office “believes information received from USCIS is accurate and we will provide more information concerning referrals to law enforcement in the near future.”

That requested review covered about one in eight people on Indiana’s voter rolls, involving those who registered without providing a state-issued form of identification.

Indiana was among four Republican states agreeing in the lawsuit settlement filed Friday to help the Trump administration gain access to state driver’s license data through a nationwide law enforcement computer network seeking out alleged noncitizen voters.

Under the agreement with Florida, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is required to continue its development of a program capable of scanning millions of state voter records for instances of noncitizen registered voters.

Morales announced in September that his office had identified a noncitizen living in Vigo County who alleged had registered to vote in 2018 and cast ballots in six elections.

That case was referred to county and federal prosecutors, but it was unclear whether any legal action has been taken as those offices did not immediately reply Wednesday to messages seeking an update.

• By John Krull, TheStatehouseFile.com

• It is hard to know which is the more impressive dubious achievement of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

  The moral turpitude?

  Or gross incompetence?

  Each can make a strong claim for priority.

  On balance, though, we must give the edge to moral turpitude.

  Trump and his intellectually and ethically challenged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have managed to work themselves and the country they’re supposed to serve into a predicament.

  The source of that predicament is the attacks they launched on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. The president and his pet secretary have asserted that the boats were engaged in drug trafficking, but they have provided no evidence to support their assertions.

  Worse, in one of the attacks, U.S. forces—quite possibly on Hegseth’s orders—killed two survivors who clung to debris in the water after the bombing.

  Hegseth’s story about his role in this has changed about as often as a kaleidoscope changes color.

  Initially, he was boastful about the killings, as if ending the lives of two people bobbing helplessly in the sea were an act of real machismo. He asserted that—in keeping with the Trump administration’s dim-bulb decision to try to rename the Defense Department the “War Department”—the days when the U.S. military would be anything less than bloodthirsty in battle were over.

  Hegseth’s chest-thumping decelerated quite a bit, though, when concerned Democrats and Republicans pointed out that killing people who can no longer pose a threat, even in a combat situation, violates the rules of war and international law. Their concerns prompted bipartisan investigations into the incident in both houses of Congress.

  Hegseth tried to backpedal by blaming, in turn, the “fog of war” and then a subordinate for the decision.

  The problem with the secretary’s first attempted evasion is that there has been no declaration of war. If a war were to result from this, a strong—in fact, an almost irrefutable—case could be made that the United States was the aggressor in the conflict.

  Even if there were a war, what the United States did on Hegseth’s watch would be a problem. Part of the reason that we Americans have abided by both rules of war and international law—which, by the way, we helped fashion—is that doing so protects our citizens around the world and serves as justification for the use of our military might in the event that our citizens are assaulted or killed.

  It will be hard for this president to invoke those rules and that law if, through him and his incoherent secretary of defense, we say that we do not feel bound by those same rules and law.

  This tough-guy-by-proxy posturing by Trump and Hegseth only serves to make Americans traveling around the globe less safe.

  Worse, other nations may not accept the Trump administration’s contention that it can unilaterally dispense with rules and laws that have been developed and agreed upon over centuries.

  Those other nations may decide that—in the most charitable interpretation—the United States committed a war crime.

  A less charitable interpretation—given that we aren’t at war—is that we committed murder.

  That’s why Hegseth, following his boss’s example, has tried to find a scapegoat, an underling he can blame for the transgression.

  But there’s a problem there, too.

  Trump and Hegseth have—loudly, stridently, angrily—been asserting that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and five other Democratic members of Congress who are veterans themselves are guilty of sedition by saying that U.S. military personnel don’t have to obey illegal orders.

  Trump’s and Hegseth’s contention has been that members of our armed forces have to obey all orders, legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional.

  If so, that relieves subordinates of any legal responsibility for their actions and kicks it all upstairs. If soldiers don’t have the legal right to refuse an illegal order—and, to be clear, both the oaths they take and the Uniform Code of Military Justice say they do have that right—then the sole responsibility for any unlawful act by the military lies at the top.

  Hegseth and Trump indict themselves with their own half-fast attacks on Kelly and other veterans.

  So, where could this leave them?

  Well, in the worst-case scenario, their defense against murder charges will be that they’re really just war criminals.

  Yes, we’ve got to give moral turpitude the win.

  John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.