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Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, said this week that he had found more than a dozen noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls — but there’s reason to be skeptical of his claims.
Forlini told Votebeat on Thursday that a comparison of the county’s jury pool — specifically, the more than 230 people who have recused themselves from jury duty since September by saying they are not U.S. citizens — and the state’s qualified voter file found 15 people who were on both lists.
Forlini said his data shows that “the system is flawed” and needs adjustments. But comparing two separate lists is generally a fraught way to find actual noncitizens on the voter rolls, experts say, and verifying his findings will be difficult. As other states have repeatedly found, lists of people identified as noncitizens are often inaccurate or outdated. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people become naturalized citizens, for instance, and they rarely take steps afterward to update their status with various government agencies.
During a press conference Monday, Monika Rittner, a department supervisor in Forlini’s office, said that three of the 15 people flagged as potential noncitizens had voted before, including one who had voted “several times but has since been removed.”
The jury pool Forlini cited comes from the state driver’s license database, which is separate from the qualified voter file (even though both are maintained by the Michigan Department of State). People do not need to be U.S. citizens to get a license or state ID in Michigan.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and his team have looked into noncitizen voting complaints across the country and found that most allegations are the result of “misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data,” as CEIR detailed in a July report.
“It is extremely hard to compare data from a jury questionnaire to data in a QVF with certainty and without false positives,” Becker told Votebeat. “Even if you get that part right, there’s still multiple ways in which the data can be misinterpreted.”
Forlini argued that his comparisons were functionally foolproof. He said his team compared names, ages, and addresses to verify that it was the same person who appeared on both lists.
“The scope that we’re doing it, this wasn’t a mass-produced thing,” he said Thursday. “It was a list where we looked at each individual person.”
He has since sent the idea on to other county clerks, and said many of them have thanked him for it.
Forlini said Monday he was handing the information off to Macomb County Corporation Counsel Frank Krycia. On Friday, Forlini said Krycia had handed it off to law enforcement but declined to say which agencies, adding that he’d been advised not to name them while the matter was under investigation. Krycia did not return a call seeking comment.
Forlini is a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, although he said he was checking for noncitizen voters in his “role as a county clerk.” Doing that work was a matter of “operational efficiency,” he said.
“I’m looking to make things better,” he said.
In recent years, Republicans around Michigan and across the U.S. have zeroed in on noncitizen voting as a threat to American elections. An instance in Ann Arbor in 2024, where a University of Michigan student from China allegedly cast a ballot and turned himself in before fleeing the country, became a focus of Republicans looking to pass a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the state.
The Michigan Department of State said it would look into the claims once Forlini’s office gives it the necessary information.
“We can’t fully evaluate his claims because he hasn’t shared specific details about the list he reviewed, how it was compiled, and how he determined these people were noncitizens,” Angela Benander, a department spokesperson, said in an email.
Noncitizen voting is extremely rare in Michigan and across the country. The Michigan Department of State conducted its own lengthy review of the state’s driving records and voting records last year and found that, across the state during the 2024 general election, it appeared a total of 16 noncitizens had cast ballots — 0.00028% of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast.
“Our department did several rounds of validation in this review to make sure that these individuals actually cast a ballot and to verify their citizenship status,” Benander said in an email. “In each additional round of review, we found more individuals who may have initially appeared to be non-citizens but were, in fact, a U.S. citizen legally able to vote in 2024.”
The state has since established “an ongoing review process” to identify possible cases as they come up.
Other states that have conducted similar audits have turned up similarly minuscule numbers. Georgia, for instance, found about 20 noncitizens in its statewide voter roll of more than 8.2 million people in 2024.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
