One county clerk in Michigan did the one thing the Secretary of State's office apparently could not be bothered to do… he took the people who answered their jury summons by saying they are not citizens and checked them against the voter rolls. Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini says in the third quarter of this year alone 236 people self reported as noncitizens, nine of them were registered to vote and one had a voting history, and the county's own list from 2025 and the first half of 2026 already had 40 more, five of them with a voting history.
And when he handed it to Lansing? Here is what he told the Daily Signal… "I have turned the information over to the Secretary of State's office. They just threw their hands up and said it's a county matter."
A county matter. The department that keeps the driver's license file these jury summonses come from, and runs the statewide voter file, says it's somebody else's problem. Back in January when Forlini first flagged 14 noncitizens registered to vote, Jocelyn Benson called him "reckless," and then her own office's review confirmed four of them were in fact noncitizens. Four. So the reckless guy was right, and the woman calling names is now the Democrat candidate for governor asking you to promote her.
And think about where these numbers come from. One county, roughly 20,000 jury summonses over two years, in a county of almost 900,000 people. Forlini says most clerks don't have the resources to do this and he would surmise the problem is bigger in Oakland and Wayne. Who is checking Wayne? Who is checking Oakland? This is weeks before Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed fight over a Senate seat that could decide control of the chamber, Dana Nessel's own office charged five noncitizens in August for voting in 2024, federal prosecutors have charged a Chinese national and a Russian national for voting in Michigan, and yet the official line is still that it's rare and you should calm down.
How many is enough? Nine? Forty? Is one illegal vote canceling out yours acceptable to you because the people in charge say the number is small? I know exactly what it feels like to be called reckless for asking these questions, and I can tell you the people doing the name calling never come back and apologize when they turn out to be wrong. The system does not check itself, and when somebody finally does check, the people at the top shrug and call it a county matter.
Here is the reality. If your kid's school found nine strangers on the pickup list you would not call it a rounding error… you would lock it down and you would want to know who put them there.
Jocelyn Benson, you run the voter file. Cross check every county the way Macomb did, publish the numbers before November 3, and stop calling the people who find the problem reckless.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Michigan County finds more noncitizens on voter rolls ahead of election.