This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.
With the high-stakes 2026 midterm election fast approaching, Michigan has conducted an independent review of its voter roll.
A report released Friday by the Office of the Auditor General found that the Michigan Department of State generally does a good job making sure only eligible people are registered to vote. But it also identified a small number of possible noncitizens, dead voters, and voters with inaccurate or ineligible birthdates.
The report could become a political football in the fall campaign. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is the Democratic nominee for governor, and Republicans have been banging the drum for years about alleged fraudulent voting under her watch.
The report helps put those claims in perspective. The auditor general — who is nonpartisan — found that 99.99% of the 8.3 million voters on the state’s Qualified Voter File, known as the QVF, had complete and valid personal data (such as address and birthdate) on file as required by state law.
The report confirmed that state and local election officials are conducting routine checks of the voter file to keep it up to date. It found that between Jan. 1, 2022, and March 30, 2026, nearly 1 million voter registrations were canceled for permissible reasons, including that the voter had died or moved away.
However, the audit also found that 403 registrations were canceled or rejected for reasons of citizenship during that period. This includes people who were registered despite checking the box on the registration form indicating they were noncitizens. It also includes people whose citizenship could not be confirmed — either because they did not check the citizen or noncitizen box on the form, or because they did not respond to election officials’ inquiries when their citizenship was challenged.
According to the report, 347 additional registrations from 2022 to 2026 were canceled because the voter “registered in error” for any reason, including being a noncitizen. It isn’t clear how many of those 347 registrations involved noncitizens.
A spokesperson for the Department of State defended the agency’s work, noting that these numbers represent a small fraction of Michigan voters. “This actually shows that election officials (state and local) are being proactive about maintaining the voter rolls – it is not evidence of a problem.”
The auditor general did not say whether any registrants flagged as potential noncitizens had voted in any elections. Last month, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, charged five noncitizens for allegedly voting illegally in the 2024 election.
The report also compared voting records to death records from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to ascertain whether dead people were casting ballots.
It found that voters who, according to state health records, had died before Election Day cast 2,582 ballots in elections since 2022. But 2,561 of those were early or absentee ballots cast by people who had died within 40 days of the election — the period during which people are allowed to vote absentee.
That suggests most of these votes were legitimately cast by living people who later died before Election Day. In 2024, an average of 281 people died in Michigan per day.
Michigan law states that election officials “shall make [their] best effort” to void absentee ballots cast by people who they learn have died before Election Day. However, the auditor’s report notes, “Because of delays between the dates of a person’s death, death certification, and formal removal from QVF, election workers may not identify and reject the absentee ballot of an elector with a date of death close to an election date.”
Other sections of the report found that 653 registered voters in Michigan have birthdates indicating they are older than 122 years old, and 73 are younger than 17 and a half. The Department of State told Votebeat there could be several reasons for that, including that birth years can sometimes be misentered in the system.
Some voters who registered before the system went digital may not have provided birthdates at all, the department said. When transferring these voters into the electronic system, where birthdate is a required field, election officials may have input their birth year as 1900 as a placeholder — a common practice in large datasets because it makes those entries easy to separate.
In one last notable finding, the auditor general discovered an error in monthly reports posted to the Department of State’s website: They significantly overreported the number of people automatically registered to vote when obtaining or updating their driver’s license or state ID card.
The Department of State acknowledged the error and corrected it. A spokesperson told Votebeat that the problem was with the script the department used to generate the reports, not with the underlying data.
Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under our Republication Guidelines. Questions? Email republishing@bridgemi.com
