Immigrant, 68, says an election worker gave him a ballot. Feds say he voted illegally

Kamlesh Shah, an elderly immigrant from India with a heart condition, moves shakily and uses a cane to get around his shared apartment in a senior living facility in Sacramento’s south Land Park neighborhood in Northern California.

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On Monday, Shah felt particularly dizzy and unwell as he came to the realization he was the subject of federal prosecution and at the red-hot center of an increasingly tense debate between California and federal officials over the security of the state’s elections.

“I can hardly walk and talk,” Shah, who is 68, said. “Now I have to face these charges.”

In November 2024, inspired by the presidential campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris, decided to see whether a new driver’s license and his ongoing application for citizenship meant he could cast a vote for the first time in his three-decades of living in the United States. He visited a Sacramento County polling place and handed over his identification. An election worker gave him the OK and a ballot, Shah told The Sacramento Bee.

So he cast a vote. He has not cast one since. A ballot, the one California sends to all its registered voters, sat unopened in his apartment on Monday.

On Nov. 15, U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents visited Shah, he said, and asked him about voting in that election. They told him the federal government was going to seek to cancel his application for citizenship, because he’d voted illegally.

On Friday, he received a notice to appear in the U.S. District Court in Sacramento on Nov. 6. He was charged with voting as an alien in a federal election, a misdemeanor charge that carries penalties of as much as a year in prison or a fine as high as $100,000. Shah falsely declared himself a U.S. citizen on Nov. 5 when he cast his ballot, according to the complaint against him.

Then on Monday, high ranking federal officials unveiled Shah’s name to the world when they revealed they had charged 28 California residents for voting illegally. Federal agents arrested 11 people that morning, according to U.S. Assistant Attorney Bill Essayli.

“Elections belong to American citizens,” Essayli said. “Even if one noncitizen votes in an election, that is a violation of the constitutional rights of every voter in California who has a legal right to have their vote be counted equally and not diluted by noncitizens.”

At least 13 of the 28 people faced felony charges. Led by President Donald Trump, who has long claimed that immigrants both legal and illegal vote in American elections in large numbers, Republican officials at the state and federal government have long sought evidence of fraud in the electoral system. Trump’s claims have been rejected by the courts and even since his return to the White House in 2025 no evidence of widespread fraud has been surfaced.

Documented cases of voter fraud are rare. Last week, federal officials claimed they had documented as many as 20,000 noncitizens on California’s voter rolls. State officials have disputed that claim. Essayli and other federal officials on Monday held up Shah’s case and the 27 others as proof the state was not enforcing citizenship.

“They’ve been on an aggressive hunt nationally for such fraud,” said UCLA law professor Rick Hasen in a blog post Monday. “It’s not surprising they’ve found little because it is a small problem.”

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None of the six cases filed in the U.S. Eastern District of California, the federal courthouse in Sacramento, rose above a misdemeanor.

“It was a really big mistake,” Shah said. “I’m really nervous and really upset.”

A spokesperson for Sacramento County’s elections department did not respond to a request for comment.

Giezell Viduya Adawag, a Vacaville resident and the wife of an U.S. Air Force veteran, was also among those arrested and charged Monday. Adawag legally immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in January 2021. She married a U.S. citizen later that year and earned her legal residency in December 2022.

Prosecutors charged her with registering to vote and casting a ballot the same day as Shah, but in her case at a polling location in Solano County.

In California, citizens can register and cast a vote on election day. But their ballot is provisional, and it is not supposed to be counted until the voter is verified by state officials. It’s unclear whether Adawag or Shah’s ballots raised any red flags with election officials. Shah appears to have remained on the voter rolls, as he showed The Sacramento Bee the ballot he’d received for this year’s election in the mail.

Homeland Security Investigations agents also interviewed Adawag last week, according to the criminal complaint filed against her. Per the complaint, after reviewing her signed registration form, Adawag acknowledged she may have voted and said she “didn’t know any better” while “seemingly indicating” she voted with her husband.

Adawag was arrested Monday morning at her home in Vacaville and appeared before court that afternoon in Sacramento. She is due back in court Nov. 9.

Another man charged Monday, Juan Antonio Rivas García, is a legal resident and Mexico national who oversees an asphalt business in Sacramento. He is charged with fraudulently registering to vote in 2018 and 2020 and voting in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. According to a criminal complaint against Rivas García, he submitted four voter registration applications from 2018 to 2022. He later voted by mail in both the 2022 and 2024 elections, per the complaint.

Rivas García applied to become a naturalized citizen in 2019, but his application was denied in 2021. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has pending removal proceeding against him, the complaint states. His first court appearance is Tuesday afternoon.

Rivas García’s brother declined to comment when reached for comment Monday afternoon.

Shah told The Bee he has been in contact with a federal public defender who will help him with his case.

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