New Jersey Scandal Raises Question: How Many Noncitizens Vote in Michigan?
The state's voter rolls are notably bloated.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has long downplayed the existence of noncitizen voting in Michigan. If the numbers out of New Jersey this week are any indication, noncitizens could be registered and voting in large numbers.
Ms. Benson has touted for a decade a Brennan Center for Justice study that found “only an estimated 30 incidents” of noncitizen voting in 24.5 million ballots. When testifying before Congress or the Michigan Legislature, she spoke of noncitizen voting as if it’s the Yeti: rumored but never proven.
Then Chinese national Haoxiang Gao voted in the 2024 presidential election, and his ballot counted. This triggered a partial review that found 15 other noncitizen votes in 2024, bringing the total to 16.
The Michigan media joined Ms. Benson in playing the numbers game. They tried to minimize the issue, arguing that 16 out of 5.7 million votes is very little. Nothing to see here.
But the headlines out of New Jersey call Michigan’s numbers into question. Governor Mikie Sherrill announced this week that 6,600 noncitizens were added to the Garden State’s voter rolls due to a software glitch. Worse, 400 of them had voted, and their ballots counted.
The 6,600 noncitizens were added to New Jersey’s voter rolls in 2023 and 2024. Ms. Benson has been Michigan’s secretary of state since 2019. She’s running for governor this year.
Michigan’s voter rolls are famously bloated. Going into the 2024 election, Michigan had 500,000 more voters registered than it has adults. Monthly additions to the voter rolls defy logic. In June, 173,000 new voters were added; it’s common to have monthly additions in the six-figure range.
Under Ms. Benson, Michigan registers all drivers to vote. Noncitizens who get a drivers license have to furnish proof of noncitizenship to not be registered to vote. But new drivers don’t explain the scale of those monthly registration numbers.
Michigan struggles with population growth. It lost an Electoral College seat after 2020 reapportionment, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer once put together a commission to study how to make Michigan grow again. How, then, did Jocelyn Benson find 173,000 new voters in June and 156,000 the month before that?
Patrice Johnson is founder and chair of Michigan Fair Elections Institute, an election-integrity group. When she heard the numbers out of New Jersey, “I thought about Michigan,” she told The Washington Star.
“I thought there’s no way we would even know because it’s difficult to get information out of the secretary of state’s office these days,” Ms. Johnson said.
Ms. Benson’s 2024 postelection review was only a partial one. And it would not have happened but for the backlash from the noncitizen voter in Ann Arbor. (Haoxiang Gao fled back to China the day before President Trump was inaugurated in January 2025.)
After learning of the 16 noncitizen voters, she didn’t change any policies to prevent the next one. She never recommended legislation for lawmakers to tackle or point out any weaknesses that might need a constitutional amendment to resolve. She admitted that Michigan’s election-security system is broken and open to anyone with as little as a student ID but never made it more secure.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services runs the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements so agencies at all levels of government can check a person’s immigration status.
“Here’s the issue: The government makes the SAVE data available, but you have to be able to check the Social Security number against them to be able to link their databases with ours,” Ms. Johnson said. “And we can’t get the Social Security numbers, so we have not been able to verify that, and neither have the clerks. This is why it’s such a big issue that the secretary of state won’t turn over the data to the federal government to let them do a search.”
Ms. Benson has been stalwart in opposing federal demands for Michigan voter data, even as she shares the same data with nongovernment organizations such as Rock the Vote and ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center.
She also opposes the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship before people can be registered to vote. When she stands in opposition to the bill, she paints women as victims.
“Who is the SAVE Act most likely to silence?” Ms. Benson wrote in February 2025. “Women — especially married women. More than 2.2 million Michigan women have married names that are different from the name on their birth certificate. If those women who have changed their names don’t have a valid U.S. passport — more than 5.8 million Michiganders do not — they might not be able to register to vote.”
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