LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – A series of accusations of voter fraud have propelled Michigan into the national spotlight just days before one of the most divisive election campaigns in U.S. history.
The Secretary of State announced Wednesday it was filing charges against a 19-year-old University of Michigan student from China who was not a U.S. citizen but voted illegally in the city of Ann Arbor.
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“Noncitizen voting is an extremely isolated and rare event,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit said in a shared statement. “Investigations in multiple states and nationwide have found no evidence of large numbers of noncitizens registering to vote. Even less common is a noncitizen actually casting a ballot.”
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the state’s director of elections removed the election duties from two township clerks in Rock River Township in the Upper Peninsula after they planned to count votes by hand instead of using voting machines as required by law. Rock River Township has a population of 1,200. The AP reported that the clerks wanted to do hand tabulations because residents requested a hand count “to restore public trust in elections.”
On Wednesday, Matt DePerno, who ran in 2022 as the Republican candidate for state attorney general, posted on X that according to the state’s Qualified Voter File, there were 114,545 Michigan voters that cast 278,113 ballots from multiple addresses across the state. That post generated 5.7 million views within 24 hours.
The post caught the attention of James Blair, the political director of the Trump 2024 Campaign & Republican National Committee, who stated on X that his team was in touch with DePerno and reviewing the matter.
Scott Aughney, an election whistle blower affiliated with Republican party, told Michigan News Source that although he thinks there is a problem with people voting more than once, he called the claim in DePerno’s post “deeply, deeply flawed” because the Qualified Voter File was not accurate.
The Secretary of State emailed Michigan News Source and said that it was a formatting error that was caught and corrected and the voters would have only one vote counted for this election.
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Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced in an Oct. 4 press release that her office filing felony charges against four St. Clair Shores residents for allegedly voting twice in the August primary election. Nessel announced that three St. Clair Shores assistant clerks also had felony charges filed against them for illegally altering the state’s Qualified Voter File involving the same incident. Michigan is considered a key swing state in the presidential election. The U.S. News & World Report wrote a Monday story with the headline, “The 2024 Swing States: Why Michigan Could Sway The Presidential Election.”
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