Michigan clerk claims he found 15 noncitizens registered to vote -- but his data may not be reliable [View all]

[RandySF]

Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, said this week that he had found more than a dozen noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls — but there’s reason to be skeptical of his claims.

Forlini told Votebeat on Thursday that a comparison of the county’s jury pool — specifically, the more than 230 people who have recused themselves from jury duty since September by saying they are not U.S. citizens — and the state’s qualified voter file found 15 people who were on both lists.

Forlini said his data shows that “the system is flawed” and needs adjustments. But comparing two separate lists is generally a fraught way to find actual noncitizens on the voter rolls, experts say, and verifying his findings will be difficult. As other states have repeatedly found, lists of people identified as noncitizens are often inaccurate or outdated. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people become naturalized citizens, for instance, and they rarely take steps afterward to update their status with various government agencies.

During a press conference Monday, Monika Rittner, a department supervisor in Forlini’s office, said that three of the 15 people flagged as potential noncitizens had voted before, including one who had voted “several times but has since been removed.”



https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2026/01/16/noncitizens-registered-vote-anthony-forlini-macomb-county/