How losers lie: Inventing a noncitizen voting crisis

In the final days before Michiganders vote in the Nov. 3, 2026 midterms, the claim that noncitizens are quietly sitting on Michigan's voter rolls is being pushed hard from Washington — not from any new finding in Lansing. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have publicized charges against dozens of people accused of being noncitizens who voted in 2022 or 2024, and have pressed states to screen their ballots against federal data that election administrators describe as unreliable. A voter hearing that claim repeated this fall is hearing it during that federal offensive, not because a Michigan investigation has uncovered a hidden pool of fraudulent ballots.

The federal effort has already met resistance in court. An appeals court signaled skepticism of the administration's bid to force California to set aside roughly 20,000 ballots tied to alleged noncitizens, and California argued its own safeguards already keep noncitizens from voting.

Michigan's elections are run by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the Bureau of Elections, which maintains the Qualified Voter File, the statewide registration list. The Secretary of State's official election guide states plainly that only U.S. citizens may register and vote. Alleged illegal voting is investigated and prosecuted by Attorney General Dana Nessel's office, working alongside county prosecutors.

What Michigan has already checked

The accusation has been examined from nearly every angle the state offers. A Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee, chaired by Senator Ed McBroom, investigated claims about the November 2020 election — including whether non-residents or other ineligible voters cast ballots. After that election, Michigan ran more than 250 post-election audits, including over 200 precinct procedural audits and a statewide hand count of presidential votes on more than 18,000 randomly selected ballots, and the Bureau of Elections reported no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct by election officials.

McBroom reached his conclusion after months of testimony. "This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan's prosecution of the 2020 election," the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee wrote. McBroom put it personally: "After innumerable hours over many months, watching, listening, and reading both in-person testimony and various other accounts, I am confident in asserting that the results of the November 2020 General Election in Michigan were accurately represented by the certified and audited results".

A recent check came in April 2025, when the Michigan Department of State reported the result of its own review of the November 2024 general election: 15 credible apparent noncitizen ballots, out of more than 5.7 million cast — about 0.00028% of votes. To find those 15, the department compared more than 7.9 million active driver records against roughly 7.2 million active registrations in the Qualified Voter File, and reported finding no evidence of any coordinated scheme. Thirteen of the 15 cases were referred to the attorney general, one voter died after casting a ballot, and one remained under investigation.

"Noncitizen voting is an extremely isolated and rare event," Benson said.

A separate election-year audit by the Michigan Office of the Auditor General, covering roughly January 2022 through March 2026, found only 321 voter records canceled for a stated citizenship-related reason — 403 when rejected applications were included — out of about 8.3 million registered voters. It also found that 99.99% of Qualified Voter File records held complete, valid required data. The audit did not establish how many of the flagged registrants had actually voted; it separately found 347 more registrations canceled as "registered in error" without determining how many involved noncitizens, according to Bridge Michigan.

When rare cases surface

The near-empty finding predates even 2020. The Brennan Center for Justice's analysis of 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions turned up roughly 30 suspected noncitizen ballots in the 2016 election — about 0.0001% — a figure Michigan's own election resource page cites.

When cases do surface, they get prosecuted. In October 2024, Washtenaw County Prosecuting Attorney Eli Savit and Benson announced charges against a 19-year-old University of Michigan student from China who allegedly registered and voted at an Ann Arbor early-voting site after signing an affidavit falsely stating he was a U.S. citizen. That ballot had already been tabulated and could not be retrieved.

In August 2026, Nessel's office announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in the November 2024 election, plus a sixth person — a U.S. citizen — accused of registering her noncitizen spouse to vote. The office framed these as a small number of individual cases, not evidence of widespread voting. "We're upholding election integrity by investigating all claims of non-citizen voters, as rare as they are, and holding bad actors accountable when they refuse to abide by the laws that keep our elections safe and secure," Nessel said.

Her office said 22 additional cases of suspected noncitizen voting or related conduct, spanning elections from 2009 through 2025, had been referred in 2026, and that 10 cases had been closed without charges.

In January 2026, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini publicly named 15 people he alleged were noncitizens on the rolls. The Bureau of Elections' review found three were U.S. citizens eligible to vote, four were apparent noncitizens, four had already been removed, and four needed further documentation — and only three of the 15 had any voting history, one of whom was a citizen who voted lawfully. The Bureau cross-checked those names against state driver and vehicle records and the federal SAVE immigration-status system. Benson called Forlini's claim overstated and warned that mislabeling citizens as noncitizens could lead to eligible voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.

Benson has described the claim that large numbers of noncitizens are registered or voting as a "myth," and has argued the state's election-security response should use "a scalpel, not a sledgehammer".

Why the claim keeps returning

The claim keeps returning largely because it has become a centerpiece of federal politics. Nessel has described the federal voting actions as "flagrantly illegal" and said the state now feels it must protect its elections from the federal government. The White House rejected that framing, saying the crackdown is about election security and accountability.

In Michigan, an effort to write proof-of-citizenship and photo ID requirements into the state constitution did not reach the November 2026 ballot. The Board of State Canvassers deadlocked 2-2 on Aug. 24, 2026, the petition ended up three signatures short of the 446,198 required, and both the Michigan and U.S. Supreme Courts declined to overturn that result.

The rule a Michigan voter can lean on is not in dispute. "Only U.S. citizens can legally register and vote in our elections," Benson said.

When the claim comes up between now and Election Day, the practical response is to ask for the specific finding: which election, how many ballots, and who checked. The checks that exist are dated and public, and they point to individual rare cases rather than to a large hidden pool of fraudulent votes. A worried voter's best move is the one the system is built for: confirm your registration and vote, knowing Michigan's own reviews have repeatedly found the rolls essentially clean rather than quietly full.