BUSTED: More Self-Reported Noncitizens Found on Michigan’s Voter Rolls

With just weeks to go before Election Day in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, one of Michigan’s largest counties says it has found more noncitizens on its voter rolls.

Macomb County, home to almost 900,000 people and the third-most-populous county in the state, shared fresh numbers from its clerk’s office this week. They cover the third quarter of 2026, and they are bound to raise questions about how people end up registered in Michigan.

In that quarter, 236 people who described themselves as noncitizens were summoned for jury duty in Macomb County. Of those who self-reported, nine were registered to vote, and one had a voting history.

Those figures do not depend on a database match or an algorithm. They come from people who told the court themselves that they are not U.S. citizens, which makes them harder to wave away as a computer error.

The county’s earlier numbers tell a similar story. Covering 2025 and the first two quarters of 2026, the county’s website lists 40 previously self-reported noncitizens. Of those, five showed a voting history.

County Clerk Anthony Forlini, a Republican who is running for Michigan secretary of state, says the issue should not be viewed through a partisan lens. It should not matter whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, he said, because every eligible voter has an interest in clean rolls.

He also says he did what a public official is supposed to do with such findings. Forlini says he turned the information over to the Secretary of State’s office, and that the answer he got was, in essence, that it is a county matter.

That response, if accurate, leaves a gap. The statewide voter file is maintained by the state’s Bureau of Elections, which is why Forlini sent his findings to Lansing in the first place. Voters are entitled to know who is responsible for acting on them.

This is not the first time Forlini has stirred this debate. In January, he announced that his office had found 14 noncitizens registered to vote, a number later put at 15. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called the initial announcement reckless.

Her office’s own review of that list found four apparent noncitizens, three people who turned out to be citizens, and four who had already been removed from the rolls. In other words, even by the state’s own account, noncitizens had been registered.

That is the point conservatives keep returning to. The argument with the state is mostly about how many, not whether. A system that really worked would not have required a county clerk to dig through jury records to find these registrations in the first place.

Defenders of the state’s system point to its own review of the 2024 election, which found that 16 people who may have been noncitizens appeared to have voted out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast, with about 8.1 million voters registered. They call that vanishingly rare.

Rare is not the same as irrelevant. Michigan’s 2016 presidential race was decided by fewer than 11,000 votes, and a state that sits on the knife’s edge cannot afford to shrug at any ineligible ballot, however small the count.

Enforcement is already underway. In April 2025, the Michigan Board of Elections referred 13 people who appeared to be noncitizens and voted in the 2024 election to the attorney general. In August, Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in 2024.

Forlini noted that Nessel prosecuted one of the people he had previously identified. That detail matters, because it suggests the county’s flagging work has led to real prosecutions, not just political talking points.

The Justice Department announced in January that an illegal immigrant had pleaded guilty to voting in Michigan’s 2020 election. Michigan has also seen several federal and state arrests for election crimes over the past two years.

Election experts do urge caution. Comparing separate lists is a fraught way to find noncitizens, and tools such as the federal SAVE database have produced false positives in the past. The state also says it has removed more than 1.1 million outdated or ineligible registrations since Benson took office, and an auditor general report found the rolls more accurate than before.