Uthmeier announces felony charges against a Canadian citizen who voted in Florida elections

A shared federal database has provided evidence to charge a Canadian citizen with voting illegally in Florida seven times, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced, chastising a federal judge who has shut down that same database for most of the country.

Melbourne resident Giorgio Dominique Mucelli, 66, is a lawful permanent resident in the United States but is not a U.S. citizen. He was charged Thursday with one count of voting by non-citizen elector and with one count of false affirmation. Both are third-degree felonies, and, if convicted as charged, he could face up to 10 years in prison.

An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Election Crime Unit as well as state prosecutors detected that Mucelli registered to vote in Broward County in April 2004, Uthmeier said, falsely saying under oath that he was a U.S. citizen.

However, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records confirmed he has maintained lawful permanent resident status, last renewing it in April 2023.

The database where state investigators detected Mucelli’s legal status came from the DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. The SAVE database was originally designed to help government agencies verify immigration status for eligibility purposes, such as access to public benefits. It has been modified to allow state and local officials to do voter citizenship checks.

In 2025, President Trump signed an executive order requiring DHS to allow states access to verify the legal status of voters on their rolls. In response, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services made changes to the SAVE database, including adding Social Security records and allowing states to conduct bulk searches. The League of Women Voters sued after that action last fall, alleging violation of federal law.

Meanwhile Florida, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio reached an agreement last year with DHS to use the SAVE database system to remove voters from registration rolls. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., blocked DHS from using its database for the rest of the country, writing that the system violated federal privacy laws.

“Her activist ruling makes it harder to verify citizenship and slows our ability to hold aliens accountable for stealing votes in Florida elections,” Uthmeier said in video announcement Thursday. “But no, we will not back down. And we are currently fighting her unlawful order in court, to protect the integrity of every American ballot.”

Judge Soonknanan’s ruling last month required DHS to disable the SAVE system, which led Florida and the three other states to file a lawsuit in federal court. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in the Northern District of Florida issued a ruling ordering DHS to restore access to the SAVE database to Florida and the other three states.

Mucelli alledgedly voted in Florida elections in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2020, 2022, and 2024. When officials confronted him, Uthmeier said, he initially lied before acknowledging “he knew he was not allowed to vote but he did it anyway.”