A years-old mistake by the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles voter registration program has endangered the citizenship of two prominent Kodiak residents and could cause them to be deported, according to a newly filed lawsuit in Alaska’s federal court.
The suit, filed Thursday by Eva Benedelova and Pavel Benedela in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services canceled their citizenship oath ceremony because they were erroneously registered to vote in Alaska when they updated their driver’s licenses in 2022.
USCIS is overdue on a decision about their citizenship, the suit claims, and it asks a judge to order final action.
Attorney Margaret Stock, who is representing the couple, said there’s a bigger issue at stake: Many more Alaskans may unknowingly be facing the same problem.
According to a timeline provided by the Alaska Division of Elections, between 2022 and 2024, “less than 50” Alaskans, “mostly non citizens,” were “being registered to vote through DMV online transactions such as address updates, license renewals, etc.” despite stating that they were not U.S. citizens and did not want to register to vote.
The Division of Elections admitted the error involving the Kodiak couple, apologized, and wrote a lettersaying that Benedelova and Benedela did nothing wrong. The couple never voted and immediately canceled their voter registration when they discovered the problem.
Alaska Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, and Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, submitted a letter of support for the couple. The office of U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, has also been working on the case and advocating for the couple. The couple’s employer, North Pacific Seafoods, backs them too.
“The errors in 2022 and 2024 were committed by the Alaska DMV, not by these upstanding individuals,” wrote Dave Hambleton, President of North Pacific Seafoods.
Despite that support and extensive documentation about the error, USCIS sent a letter to Pavel Benedela on Dec. 5 stating that the federal agency is seeking further evidence and that “false claims to U.S. citizenship and voting violations … even renders an alien deportable.”
The couple have two children who have grown up in the United States, Stock said. If either one of them becomes a citizen, the children will, too. If they don’t, all could be deported.
“It’s an insane situation,” Stock said. “It shouldn’t be happening. It’s not right. It’s unjust. The state’s at fault, and they shouldn’t be punishing these folks because of errors made by State of Alaska employees.”
According to the complaint, the delay in the Kodiak couple’s citizenship application appears to be due in part to a federal policy implemented by USCIS in May 2025 that requires the agency’s headquarters to approve all matters where an applicant has been registered to vote in the United States.
“By the way, blanket policies like that are unlawful,” Stock said.
According to a timeline of events provided by the Alaska Division of Elections, the errors affecting the Kodiak couple and an unknown number of other Alaskans took place at the DMV between 2022 and 2024.
Alaska law allows people who update their driver’s licenses — or get new ones — to automatically register themselves to vote.
It’s supposed to be an opt-in process, but in 2022, an update to DMV’s system “cause(d) online transactions with DMV to automatically opt-in people who don’t select either yes or no,” an act that sent voter registrations to the Division of Elections, the division’s timeline states.
In the case of Benedelova and Benedela, someone along the process — likely a state employee — filled out the voter registration form in their name, copying their signatures without their knowledge or consent.
“I confirm that Mr. Benedela and Mrs. Benedelova did not specify on any DOE document that they are U.S. citizens,” wrote elections supervisor Ryan Wilson on Dec. 12. “Additionally, your signatures on the voter registration forms are a digital copy of which neither of you was aware of its use.”
Stock said that while Benedela and Benedelova are the only people who have come forward publicly about the issue, she is aware of others in the same position.
“I can tell you that I know other people the same things happen to, so it’s not just a one-off with these two people,” she said.
Stock said that in her career, she’s seen many examples of people mistakenly registered to vote because of a lack of understanding about what a citizen is, but this case is something different.
“The creepy thing is that the registration form says you’re not allowed to use an electronic signature on it, but the state’s been doing that anyway. … We have a copy of their voter registration form, and the state created that on their own, without the immigrants’ knowledge, and submitted it and checked off that they were US citizens. Some employee of the state is really doing bad things, basically,” Stock said.
A spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Administration, which oversees the DMV, did not answer questions by the deadline for this article on Friday.
The Division of Elections, which has been examining the issues for years, provided detailed documentation and explanations, as well as an apology it sent the couple.
According to its timeline of events, Benedelova was registered to vote through the DMV process in September 2022.
The division became aware of noncitizens being registered to vote by the DMV in 2023 or 2024 and worked with the DMV to reword their forms and change the process so people who opted out did not have their information sent to the division.
An additional question was also added to the process: “Are you a U.S. Citizen?”
Despite those changes, the effects of the erroneous process appear to be lingering. This summer, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Alaska and other states to provide copies of their voter rolls in order to identify noncitizens who may have illegally participated in state or local elections.
The data provided by the division and obtained by the Beacon via a public records request included an inactive voters list with 541 people whose records were tagged as “NC” for non-citizen.
Among those 541 people were Benedelova and Benedela, who had canceled their registrations in 2024 immediately after learning they had been erroneously registered.
At the time the record was released, the director of the Division of Elections said to treat it cautiously because some people might have been erroneously labeled.
“When we have gone in there and looked and contacted them, we have found that usually it was a mistake,” she said.