A federal grand jury in the District of South Carolina has indicted a 38-year-old Rock Hill, S.C., resident on a charge of voting illegally as a non-citizen in the 2024 general election, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina.
The defendant, Ekam Monfum, is a Legal Permanent Resident who came to the United States in December 2022 and obtained his green card through marriage to a U.S. citizen, the Department of Justice said. He faces a single count under what the release describes as “illegally voting as an alien,” a federal misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of one year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine.
Ekam Monfum is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in the next few weeks. The Department of Justice stated that “all charges in the indictment are merely accusations and defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Understanding the Case of Ekam Monfum
What the Ekam Monfum indictment alleges
The DOJ release lays out a narrow set of allegations and avoids personalizing the conduct beyond the charge itself.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, “a registration to vote was submitted through the registration portal with the South Carolina Election Commission in Ekam Monfum’s name” in August 2024. The release notes that the South Carolina registration process “requires the registrant to affirm that they are a United States citizen.” On that basis, the release states, “Ekam Monfum voted in the 2024 election.”
Federal prosecutors did not allege in the release that Ekam Monfum personally typed the registration entry, nor did they describe how the conduct was detected. The release does not name his spouse, and the spouse has not been charged.
The case is being investigated by the FBI Columbia Field Office. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Potterfield is prosecuting.
How South Carolina voter registration works at the affirmation step
The South Carolina Election Commission, or SCEC, operates an online registration portal at scvotes.gov that is open to any person who holds a South Carolina driver’s license or a state-issued identification card. A would-be registrant enters identifying information, including a driver’s license or DMV ID number, a date of birth, the last four digits of a Social Security number, and a residential address. The system then runs the entries against state databases and proceeds to a series of attestations.
One of those attestations is the citizenship affirmation. The portal requires the registrant to check a box stating, under penalty of perjury, that the registrant is a citizen of the United States. There is no separate documentary upload step in the online flow. The affirmation is the gate.
That mechanical detail is why federal prosecutors built the indictment around the registration event in August 2024. The criminal exposure does not turn on the act of marking a ballot alone — it begins at the affirmation. A registrant who is not a U.S. citizen and who completes the citizenship check-box has, under federal law, made the false statement that enables the later vote. The vote, in turn, is the act prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 611.
South Carolina is also one of several states whose Department of Motor Vehicles transactions can prompt a voter-registration step. The DMV pathway is separate from the scvotes.gov portal, and the DOJ release in this case specifies that the registration was submitted “through the registration portal” with SCEC. The release does not allege a DMV-pathway registration. That detail matters because it places the affirmation event squarely within the online portal, where the citizenship attestation is the single user-facing screen that separates a citizen registrant from a non-citizen one.
South Carolina does not allow same-day voter registration. The online deadline for the 2024 general election was Oct. 6, 2024 — meaning any registration submitted in August 2024 was well inside the legal window for the November ballot.
The charging statute and what one year means
The federal statute behind the charge is 18 U.S.C. § 611, titled “Voting by aliens.” It is a misdemeanor. It bars any non-citizen from voting in any election for federal office and carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison, a fine, or both. The one-year cap described in the DOJ release is the tell that § 611 is the charging statute.
Federal prosecutors had another option on the shelf. 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f) makes it a felony to knowingly make any false statement in an application or registration to vote in any federal, state or local election. That statute carries a five-year maximum. According to the language of the DOJ release, prosecutors did not file the § 1015(f) charge. They chose the lower-max misdemeanor.
The release does not explain why. Charging decisions in this category often turn on what the government believes it can prove about intent — particularly whether a defendant knew at the moment of the citizenship affirmation that the statement was false. A misdemeanor charge under § 611 also opens a faster procedural path. Misdemeanor cases can be resolved before a federal magistrate judge, can move on a compressed pretrial schedule, and are far more likely than felony cases to terminate in a plea agreement. The selection of § 611 is a fact worth noting, not a fact worth speculating about.
For sentencing purposes, a one-year federal misdemeanor sits in a different category than a five-year felony. A conviction would not, on its face, expose the defendant to a multi-year prison term. It would still leave a federal criminal conviction on the record, with all the downstream civil consequences that follow.
The collateral immigration consequences
The federal criminal charge is not the only legal exposure created by the conduct DOJ has alleged. Two civil immigration statutes operate on a parallel track, and they do not require a criminal conviction to trigger.
The first is 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(6)(A). Under that provision, any non-citizen “who has voted in violation of any Federal, State, or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation is deportable.” The civil deportability analysis runs independent of the criminal case. An acquittal under § 611 does not foreclose removal proceedings on the same underlying facts.
The second is 8 U.S.C. § 1101(f)(3), the “good moral character” provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. A non-citizen who has voted unlawfully is statutorily barred from establishing good moral character — a requirement for naturalization. For a Legal Permanent Resident pursuing eventual U.S. citizenship, that bar is a hard ceiling.
In practical terms, the indictment alone has placed Ekam Monfum on two tracks at once. The criminal track will play out in federal court in Columbia. The immigration track sits with the Department of Homeland Security and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The two tracks do not need each other to move.
For a Legal Permanent Resident who came to the United States in late 2022, the naturalization timeline ordinarily runs five years from the grant of permanent residency, or three years from the date of permanent residency for a non-citizen married to and residing with a U.S. citizen. The good-moral-character bar under § 1101(f)(3) reaches back across the statutory look-back window for naturalization applications. An unlawful-voting finding inside that window is, in practical terms, dispositive of the application.
Context, not extrapolation
Federal prosecutions under § 611 are not common. The Department of Justice files a small handful nationally each year, typically following local detection during routine list-maintenance or post-election audits by state election officials. The Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks documented instances of non-citizen voting, has reported rates measured in fractions of one one-hundredth of one percent of votes cast in the jurisdictions it has sampled. The Heritage Foundation maintains a separate database of documented voter-fraud cases nationally, and entries from South Carolina exist but are limited.
That national picture is the context the Ekam Monfum indictment sits inside. It does not make the case smaller, and it does not make it larger. It is one federal indictment, presented by 16 to 23 grand jurors in the District of South Carolina, alleging a single count against a single defendant.
The SCEC processed approximately 2.45 million general-election ballots in November 2024, and the agency reported a turnout of 70.5 percent of approximately 3.47 million registered voters statewide. The state withdrew from the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC, in 2023 and now relies on data-sharing with the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Public Safety for active list maintenance.
The DOJ release does not state how the registration in Ekam Monfum’s name was identified, or whether the SCEC referred the case to federal authorities. Those details may emerge at arraignment or in subsequent filings.
What happens next
Arraignment is the next step. The defendant will appear before a federal magistrate, hear the charge read into the record, and enter a plea. Misdemeanor cases under § 611 frequently resolve through plea agreement rather than trial. If the case proceeds, Speedy Trial Act timing applies.
The procedural calendar will be public. The collateral immigration questions — deportation, the naturalization bar — will not necessarily be visible on the federal criminal docket, and may move on a separate timeline through immigration channels.
The indictment is an accusation, not a conviction of Ekam Monfum. As the Department of Justice noted in its release, “all charges in the indictment are merely accusations and defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.” MyrtleBeachSC News will follow the docket.
## Further Reading
Ekam Monfum – [USAO-SC press release index](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr) — Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of South Carolina
Ekam Monfum – [18 U.S.C. § 611 — Voting by aliens](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611) — Cornell Legal Information Institute
Ekam Monfum – [18 U.S.C. § 1015 — False statements in voter registration](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1015) — Cornell Legal Information Institute
Ekam Monfum – [8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(6)(A) — Deportable aliens, unlawful voters](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1227) — Cornell Legal Information Institute
Ekam Monfum – [8 U.S.C. § 1101(f) — Good moral character definition](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101) — Cornell Legal Information Institute
Ekam Monfum – [South Carolina Election Commission — voter registration](https://www.scvotes.gov/south-carolina-voters/register-to-vote/) — SCEC online portal information
Ekam Monfum – [South Carolina Election Commission — 2024 general election results](https://www.scvotes.gov/) — SCEC
Ekam Monfum – [Brennan Center for Justice — research on non-citizen voting](https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/voting-system-failures/noncitizen-voting) — Brennan Center
Ekam Monfum – [Heritage Foundation — Election Fraud Database](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud) — Heritage Foundation
Ekam Monfum – [FBI Columbia Field Office](https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/columbia) — Federal Bureau of Investigation
