A Franklin County, Ohio judge acquitted Maria Dearaujo of illegally voting in the 2018 election, ruling that a defense entrapment claim succeeded and that a state employee’s advice helped lead her to register and vote when she was not a U.S. citizen. The decision was announced Tuesday by Judge Chris Brown, who said Dearaujo’s trial testimony aligned with documentary evidence. Brown also said the defense proved entrapment by a preponderance of the evidence.
The acquittal comes in a case that drew attention during the Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost administration and its push in 2024 to prosecute alleged unlawful voting by noncitizens. A guilty verdict would have exposed Dearaujo, 63, to up to 18 months in prison, according to the report of the trial. After the judge delivered the ruling, Dearaujo clasped her hands in a prayer-like fashion and appeared to cry, thanking Brown and her public defender, Jason Inman.
Brown, who is a Democrat, said Dearaujo’s testimony about how she acted was consistent with the evidence presented at trial. In the judge’s account, Dearaujo acknowledged “inconvenient” facts about voting despite knowing she was not a citizen, but she also said she never intended to vote until a Bureau of Motor Vehicles clerk told her to register. Brown said the court found that Dearaujo proved an affirmative entrapment defense, describing entrapment as government actors leading a person into committing a crime they would not have otherwise committed.
Prosecutors’ case centered on voting eligibility and what state systems showed. The report says that during a 2005 Bureau of Motor Vehicles interaction, Dearaujo registered to vote, and a form she signed included a marked “YES” answer to a question about U.S. citizenship. Dearaujo testified she did not mark the answer, and prosecutors did not summon testimony from the BMV clerk who handled the transaction to confirm it. After registering, she did not vote in the years immediately following, and later vehicle-registration issues prompted additional Bureau of Motor Vehicles contact.
According to testimony summarized in the report, Dearaujo’s vehicle registration expired in 2015, leading to another trip to the BMV, where she said she was told she could vote. Her registration update form included no answer to the written citizenship-status question, and a Franklin County Board of Elections official testified that policy at the time instructed clerks to review older data gathered by the BMV, which contributed to the state’s reliance on the 2005 attestation. Dearaujo then voted in person in the 2016 and 2018 elections, including voting in 2018 at the Heritage Free Will Baptist Church on Columbus’ south side, the report says.
The case escalated after the Ohio Secretary of State’s office investigated and notified Dearaujo in the fall of 2019 that she had voted illegally in 2018 as a noncitizen. The report describes a letter telling her to return a form confirming whether she was a U.S. citizen or to cancel her voter registration if she was not. Dearaujo later stopped voting until 2024, when she was naturalized as a citizen.
Even with the state-court acquittal, immigration consequences were still in question, according to Mark Nesbit, an immigration lawyer interviewed after the verdict. Nesbit said the evidence at Dearaujo’s citizenship proceedings showed that in her 2023 citizenship application she said she had never registered or voted in a U.S. election, and that immigration adjudicator John Matz testified that a “yes” answer would have led to rejection. Nesbit said false statements on government forms can lead to denaturalization and that the Trump administration has sought to expand the use of denaturalization procedures, although he said the acquittal makes outcomes less certain.
Nesbit said the U.S. Department of Justice could still argue that Dearaujo misrepresented a material fact on her citizenship application, and he said he did not think she was “completely out of the woods.” The report says Dearaujo immigrated from Arapongas, Brazil in 1993, overstayed a visa, married a U.S. citizen in 1997, and later became a lawful permanent resident on Nov. 30, 1999, before naturalizing about 30 years later. In a brief interview, she told reporters she worked in a factory and said she has one adult son, adding that she did not feel guilty.
The report also described other “illegal voting” cases that Yost announced in 2024, saying several drew poor results. Two cases were described as pending in Franklin County, and the report said one prosecution ended in public embarrassment after a suspect named by Yost was reported dead for more than a year at the time of the indictment. In Summit County, the report says Lorinda Miller—78 at indictment—entered an intervention in lieu of conviction, avoiding any finding of guilt or jail time, and that a Canadian-born defendant, Nicholas Fontaine, entered a no contest plea after motions to dismiss failed, with his lawyer saying it was a strategy choice despite potential federal immigration consequences.
As for whether the state would seek to overturn the acquittal, the report said the prosecutor handling the case and Yost’s press team would not say if an appeal is planned. Steve Irwin, a Yost spokesperson, said the office was reviewing the ruling Tuesday. The report further said Yost recently announced plans to resign early effective June 7 to work for a religious conservative legal advocacy organization, and that Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Andy Wilson, director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, to succeed him while Wilson said last week he was reviewing current cases with rank-and-file prosecutors.