Michigan has more than 8.4 million registered voters, but in some counties, the number of registered voters exceeds the number of people who are of voting age, a striking discrepancy that has attracted scrutiny and lawsuits.
Michigan, a closely watched battleground state, has “one of the most bloated voter rolls in the nation” with 500,000 more registered voters than there are Michiganders of voting age, a local outlet found this week.
The report comes after the Republican National Committee revealed in a lawsuit in March that 53 counties had registration rates of 100% or higher based on U.S. Census data.
“These voter registration rates are abnormally or, in the case of counties with greater than 100% registration, impossibly high,” attorneys for the RNC wrote, arguing that the data showed the state’s voter list hygiene was not only poor but in violation of the National Voter Registration Act.
The RNC’s lawsuit remains pending and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, an elected Democrat, has moved to dismiss it. The legal fight began days after a judge ruled in favor of Benson and against the Public Interest Legal Foundation in a lawsuit that made similar accusations.
Attorneys for Benson defended her “rigorous list maintenance practices” against the RNC’s claims, saying that since 2019 her office has removed about 800,000 people from the statewide voter roll and that another 360,000 would be removed in 2025.
Secretaries of state are required by the NVRA and other state and federal laws to maintain clean voter rolls, that is, they must timely remove from their voter registration the names of people who have died, moved, been convicted of felonies, or otherwise become ineligible to vote.
Benson’s attorneys explained to the RNC that many voters are inactive, but the law requires them to be kept on the voter registration list until they fail to participate in two federal elections unless the voter has requested to be removed from the list or has died.
The attorneys also argued that the RNC used a “questionable interpretation” of Census data to reach its registration conclusions because it only offered a “snapshot” of a person’s living situation. They said that even if that data were correct, when factoring in the number of registered voters who were inactive, no county voter registration rate reached or exceeded 100%.
Some of the counties, however, reached 90% or higher even after factoring in inactive voters, which far exceeds the Census finding that 70% of the voting-age population was registered to vote in 2022.
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Benson’s attorneys also said that the RNC found no instances of voter fraud that had occurred because a registered voter improperly voted in a jurisdiction. Michigan has also installed safeguards such as ballot signature matching to prevent illegal activity, such as someone voting on behalf of someone else.
In response to the local Michigan outlet’s recent findings, a spokeswoman for Benson reiterated what her office explained in the lawsuits and said the legal complaints were merely an effort to “lay the groundwork to overturn the results of the election if they don’t like them.”
