A new state report released Friday evaluates how well Michigan is maintaining its voter rolls.
The Michigan Office of the Auditor General looked at different factors like how many dead voters or non-U.S. citizens were registered.
In both cases, the number was exceptionally low compared to the 8 million total registered voters in Michiganders.
Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie said that’s a sign the system is working.
“When we look at those individual categories, that is a demonstration that we are finding people who are not eligible and keeping track of them through our systems and protocols,” he said.
However, a small fraction of a percent of those registered voters still appeared to be dead or noncitizens at first glance.
Edevbie said even those numbers can be misleading, especially because of a lag in data catching up when people become citizens.
“Those people, over the course of those four years, will come into the Secretary of States office, update their driver’s license, update their state ID and give us new documentation demonstrating that they are now a citizen. But there’s a lag time because they don’t automatically send it in,” he said.
According to the report, the state canceled over 300 noncitizen registrations during the observation period. That’s part of a broader set of nearly 1 million defunct registrations that got pulled during that same span.
Regarding dead voters, the report found a little over 2,500 Michigan voters cast a ballot within the past four years despite dying by Election Day.
That was around 0.01% of total votes over that period. The vast majority appear to be absentee voters who died before the election and didn’t have their ballots pulled.
Edevbie said some of the issues stem from when the records were transferred to a new file in the late 1990s.
“Every administration since then has done a lot of work to get our voter rolls into a great place, and this administration continues to do that. We’ve updated 95% of the voter records,” he said.
Election integrity activists have often criticized the state for not doing more on the front end to check citizenship when registering voters. They’ve also argued the state hasn’t done enough to remove dead voters from the files.
