Non-citizen faces felony charges after voting in Michigan election

• Authorities are allowing non-citizens to vote in Michigan, prompting investigations and criminal charges
• The 19-year-old student from China is said to have voted at the polling station in Ann Arbor on the weekend
• Election experts say such cases are extremely rare. State officials vow to take each case seriously.

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A person who is not a U.S. citizen is facing a felony charge in Michigan after allegedly voting at a polling station in Ann Arbor over the weekend, state and local officials said Wednesday.

That voter – according to the Detroit News and confirmed by the Secretary of State's Office, is a 19-year-old University of Michigan student from China – could face up to nine years in prison if found guilty. Only US citizens are eligible to vote in federal and state elections.

Once a voter casts his or her ballot in person, often by entering it into a tabulator, under Michigan's ballot secrecy system it typically cannot be identified among other ballots and cannot be later retrieved or canceled.

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In a joint statement, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Washtenaw County Attorney Eli Savit said a local employee referred the voter to law enforcement, who then investigated. In her own statement, Attorney General Dana Nessel said her office was conducting a parallel investigation.

“Make one thing clear: Voting results are public – any non-citizen who attempts to vote fraudulently in Michigan puts themselves at great risk and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Benson and Savit said in their statement.

People in Michigan registering to vote or requesting a ballot must sign an affidavit certifying that they are citizens. Lying on these forms is a felony — one of two charges facing the ineligible voter in Ann Arbor. The other reason is trying to vote as an ineligible voter.

Non-citizen voting is extremely rare. Officials and election integrity researchers have found only a few dozen examples of non-citizen elections across the country over several years, and those examples are typically prosecuted, as officials plan to do in the Washtenaw County case.

Election experts warn that a single vote from someone who is not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to vote is not a sign of widespread illegal voting.

“Most of the time in elections, one vote doesn’t matter,” said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. “It is unfortunate when a ballot is counted that should not be counted. … But one vote cast that should not be counted is not evidence that there are thousands of votes in a similar situation.”

Douglas pointed out that non-citizens are unlikely to risk casting a vote illegally, knowing that if they are caught they will face both criminal prosecution and potentially loss of their legal immigration status have to calculate.

Still, conservative officials and activists across the country have argued that large-scale voting by non-citizens poses an urgent threat, and they have looked for examples of illegal registration or voting by non-citizens, particularly in swing states. Michael Morley, a professor at Florida State University who teaches election law, said election officials in Republican-leaning states have conducted “thorough” analyzes of their voter rolls, which in some places has led to litigation with the Justice Department.

“Potential non-citizens that election officials found across the country were in the hundreds or perhaps thousands of millions of registered people,” Morley said of the effort. And even those numbers may be overstated, he said, because they could include people who were reported as non-citizens but were naturalized, or people who were not correctly matched between the voter rolls and the reference database for other reasons, meaning that her citizenship was misrepresented was questioned.

Targeting non-citizens to vote can quickly escalate into a kind of witch hunt, Morley said, in which, in the worst case scenario, someone makes assumptions about a person's citizenship based on their language or the color of their skin.

The more immediate problem, he said, is the danger that the case of alleged non-citizen voting in Ann Arbor could become misinformation about the overall election.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at [email protected].