Civics: Michigan Prosecutes Five Noncitizen Voters
Prosecuting vote fraud is good for deterrence and public confidence, so credit to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for announcing criminal cases last week against five noncitizens who allegedly cast ballots in 2024. “We’re upholding election integrity,” said Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, “by investigating all claims of non-citizen voters, as rare as they are, and holding bad actors accountable.”
These charges follow an audit by Michigan’s State Department last year, cross-checking the voter file against driver’s license records, which identified 15 apparent noncitizens who cast ballots in November 2024. Though this isn’t big enough to call it even a rounding error in a total of 5.7 million votes cast, every noncitizen ballot deserves to be investigated.
That list was handed to Ms. Nessel’s office, along with a couple dozen other suspected cases from 2009 to 2025, many of which remain under investigation. Three of the five noncitizens charged so far are lawful permanent residents. Three are accused of voting in person, not by mail. The AG has also charged a sixth case against a citizen who allegedly registered her noncitizen husband to vote, and who claims she was trying to test the system.
The AG’s office does an educational service as well by explaining in some detail the investigations that didn’t pan out. “Two voters subject to cases referred by the Michigan Department of State were American citizens,” it says. No surprises there. Naturalization ceremonies happen all the time, and records can become outdated, which is why database matching always needs to be followed up.
Another woman is “presumed” a citizen, the AG’s office says, but was “subject to a complicated international adoption as an infant many decades ago,” and “her federal alien file is both missing and irreplicable.” A further case involves “a federally recognized American Indian Born in Canada.” This permits U.S. residence, not voting, yet there’s confusion, since “much of the paperwork and language around this status designation refers to such individuals as dual citizens.”
Six other cases were closed because the AG’s office said it couldn’t prove those voters knew they weren’t qualified, or else their manner of registration couldn’t be determined. State law bars prosecuting people who erroneously end up on the rolls, and if the government later encourages them to vote, there’s an entrapment defense. This calls to mind New Jersey’s 400 noncitizen voters, who cast ballots after the state mistakenly registered them.
