LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s best efforts to downplay noncitizens voting in elections is not working.
According to a report from Just the News, Benson’s “review of non-citizens on state voter rolls only included those with driver’s licenses.” The report goes on to say that the evaluation excluded those who “registered to vote without a driver’s license or another form of identification.”
Earlier this month, Benson’s office released findings that 15 non-citizens voted in Michigan during the Nov. 2024 election. Thirteen have been referred to Attorney General Dana Nessel for prosecution. One such example is a Chinese foreign national student studying at the University of Michigan who cast his ballot in October. His guilty conscious, not election protocols, lead to his ineligible vote being cast. However, the vote still counted as there was no way to retrieve it.
Text messages between Benson and her team show where the state’s top election official asked, “I need to know the number of active registered voters who don’t have a license or ID affiliated with their record…and if possible we need to know the number in that universe who voted in 2020…just for raw data right now please.” Then Benson texted, “Need to be able to say the vast majority of voters reg w an ID or DL and have a number to go with that.”
Benson spent much of the fall in the lead up to the November 2024 election mocking critics who claimed non-citizens weren’t being kept from voting.
