A 70-year-old Canadian citizen named Denis Bouchard just got sentenced to two months in federal prison for illegally voting in nine U.S. elections — and if you're wondering how that's even possible, congratulations, you've been paying more attention than the people who run our elections.
Nine elections. Not one oopsie. Not a clerical mix-up. Nine deliberate, fraudulent votes cast across 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2024. But sure, tell us again how non-citizen voting "never happens."
According to Just The News, Bouchard has lived in the United States since the 1960s but never became a citizen. He registered to vote in New Hanover and Pender Counties in southeastern North Carolina by simply checking the citizenship box on his registration applications — and nobody caught it for two decades. He pleaded guilty to two counts of making false claims of citizenship.
U.S. District Court Justice James Dever of the Eastern District of North Carolina handed down the sentence, which also includes one year of supervised release and potential immigration consequences. Federal attorney Ellis Boyle didn't mince words about it.
"We will not allow aliens to disrupt and degrade the U.S. democratic system by lying to pervert the outcome of our elections," Boyle said.
Great sentiment. Love the energy. But two months? The man corrupted nine elections and he's getting less time than you'd spend waiting for your car at a dealership service center.
Let's be clear about what happened here. Bouchard checked a box that said he was a citizen. Nobody verified it. He voted. Then he did it again. And again. And again — for twenty years across nine separate federal elections. The investigation was conducted by the FBI, the North Carolina State Board of Elections, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It took all three agencies to catch what a single ID check at the polls would have prevented.
This is the case we should be stapling to every single argument about voter ID laws and election integrity. Every time some cable news "expert" rolls their eyes and says non-citizen voting is a myth, we now have a guy who did it nine times in one of our swing-ish states and walked around free for two decades while doing it.
The left will tell you this is an isolated incident. One guy. No big deal. But that's exactly the point — if one Canadian in rural North Carolina got away with it for twenty years, how many others are still getting away with it in places where nobody's even looking?
Two months in prison. That's the price of undermining American democracy nine times over. If you shoplifted nine times from the same store, you'd probably get more.
We spent years being told we were conspiracy theorists for saying non-citizens vote in our elections. Denis Bouchard just proved us right — nine times over.