Eliezer Kadoch, a thirty-nine-year-old French citizen living in Toms River, New Jersey, stood in a Trenton federal courtroom on June 25, 2026, and pleaded guilty to voting illegally in the November 8, 2022 election. The charge: voting by an alien in a federal election, a violation of 18 USC 611.
His defense attorney's explanation is where the story gets interesting.
Attorney Yosef Jacobovitch told Fox News that his client "mistakenly believed he was allowed to vote because he was automatically registered when he received his New Jersey" driver's license. Not that Kadoch sought out a registration form. Not that he lied on an application. The state's automatic voter registration system enrolled him when he walked into the DMV.
U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Brandon Day accepted the guilty plea in the District of New Jersey, case number 26-5044. Kadoch faces a maximum of six months in prison and a fine of up to $100,000, with sentencing scheduled for October 26, 2026. U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer's office announced the case as part of the Election Integrity Task Force, a joint effort between the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph McFarlane prosecuted the case out of Ocean County. The facts aren't in dispute — Kadoch is a French national, he was not a U.S. citizen, and he voted. The only question that lingers is how a foreign national ended up on the voter rolls in the first place.
The answer, according to his own attorney, is that the system put him there.
New Jersey's automatic voter registration program links the DMV to the voter registration system. Get a license, get registered. The safeguards that are supposed to screen out non-citizens either failed or don't exist in New Jersey. Jacobovitch's framing is essentially that the state created the conditions for the crime and his client walked into them.
Advocates of automatic voter registration have long argued that the system merely removes barriers to participation for eligible citizens. The America First Policy Institute and other election integrity organizations have countered that linking registration to driver's license applications creates exactly this kind of vulnerability — non-citizens who hold valid licenses get swept into the rolls unless an affirmative screening mechanism catches them. As reported by 100percentfedup.com, this case is precisely the scenario critics have warned about for years.
The prosecution isn't contesting the mechanics of how Kadoch was registered. They're prosecuting the act of voting itself, which remains a federal crime regardless of how registration occurred. That's the legally correct position. But it also means the system that registered a French national to vote in an American election faces no consequences at all.
Kadoch gets a sentencing date. New Jersey gets to keep running the same system that put him on the rolls. One of those outcomes involves accountability. The other involves a DMV.