An illegal immigrant charged with using a fake ID to vote in Alabama elections and obtaining multiple fraudulent U.S. passports pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court.
Angelica Maria Francisco, 42, of Guatemala, pleaded guilty to nine charges: false claims of citizenship in connection with voting, false statements in application for a U.S. passport, use of a U.S. passport obtained by false statements and aggravated identity theft.
Court documents show Francisco was living in Russellville in 2011 when she obtained a false identity to obtain a passport to travel to Guatemala. She used the same identity to vote in Alabama in 2016 and 2020.
The office of Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen assisted in the investigation.
Allen’s team has prioritized voter roll maintenance since the state was removed from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Allen developed the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) to replace the system in hopes of identifying fake voter registrations such as Francisco’s.
The system works with the U.S. Postal Service, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA), other states and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to clean up voter files.
According to the SSA’s Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) database, the Secretary of State’s office sent 62,386 verification requests this year. Of those, the database came back with 9,784 “deceased matches.”
While Allen’s office confirmed the database is “presumably accurate,” they said that does not mean that nearly 10,000 people have tried to register to vote with a dead person’s identity. Some of those numbers reflect regular voter file maintenance and removal of people who have died. The Secretary of State’s Office and the Board of Registrars in all counties work to keep voter rolls up-to-date.
Allen has also implemented a new process to remove ineligible non-citizens from voter rolls.
As of August, he removed 3,251 non-citizen voters from the rolls.
Francisco will be sentenced on December 9.
To connect with the author of this story or to comment, email erica.thomas@1819news.com.
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