Forlini says federal government helped him find 7 noncitizens registered to vote

“Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here. Republican secretary of state candidate and Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini said he has used his county’s jury pool to find more potential noncitizens registered to vote — and this time, he said the federal government is helping him to verify people’s citizenship. It’s not the first time Forlini has used the jury pool to try to find potential noncitizen voters. But Forlini told Votebeat on Monday that Macomb County now has “other methods” of checking citizenship “that we didn’t have before.” Forlini is working with federal officials who have access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database , a tool maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to verify a person’s citizenship. He does not have access himself — local officials rarely do — but by collaborating with federal officials, his team is still able to verify information, he said. It was not clear which specific federal department he was working with, though. “I can’t tell you offhand,” Forlini said in a phone interview Monday morning. “I honestly don’t know.” But, he said, the additional support from the federal government has made him more confident than ever that the people he found are registered to vote but are not citizens. Forlini, Benson disagree on using jury pools to check for noncitizen voters Forlini made news earlier this year when his team in Macomb County compared the state’s voter file with a list of people who recently recused themselves from jury duty by claiming they were not U.S. citizens. He initially claimed he found 15 people who were on both lists, including three people with a voting history. A deeper investigation by Secretary of State Joceyn Benson’s office later found that one of the three was a citizen after all, while one was not and had last voted in 2018 before their registration was canceled in 2022. The third was under review at the time. It can be misleading to compare jury pools to lists of registered voters, because it’s common for people to have similar or identical names, even at the same address. Similar issues have come up when other states have tried comparing different databases to find noncitizens in voting rolls and ultimately came up with inflated numbers of potential noncitizens. One expert told Votebeat in January that false positives are common when comparing voter databases to others. And in this case, even if the same person is on both lists, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are an illegal voter — for instance, it’s possible that someone lied about being a noncitizen to get out of jury duty. After contradicting some of Forlini’s findings, the Department of State warned all clerks in March that using jury pools to find potential noncitizen voters could wrongly strip a voter’s registration or cause them to be subject to “undue criminal investigation.” Shortly after that, Forlini won a three-way race for the GOP nomination to be Michigan’s next secretary of state. Forlini believes he found 7 noncitizens registered to vote This time around, Forlini said he found 11 people who have been excused from jury duty since the start of 2026 for being noncitizens and were at one time registered to vote in Michigan, including seven who still are. Forlini said he sent those seven names to the Michigan Bureau of Elections, which maintains the statewide voter list, on April 28. It’s not clear if any of the flagged individuals ever actually voted. Cheri Hardmon, a spokesperson for the Department of State, said in a statement that the department was still reviewing what Forlini sent. “However, this referral to [the Bureau of Elections] is the process we have encouraged clerks to follow when questions arise about citizenship status based on jury lists,” she said. But this time, Forlini is convinced he is correct. He has gone as far as to maintain numbers on the Macomb County website tracking what he has found. It’s part of a larger effort, he said, to try to get county clerks access to SAVE. President Donald Trump’s administration upgraded the database last year to enable election officials to run their voter rolls through it, but it, too, has produced many false positives . A ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that the database mislabeled some citizens as noncitizens in at least five states. Typically, it is state-level officials who work with SAVE. But Forlini is not the first local official to use the database to cross-reference voters’ citizenship. Justin Heap, the recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, used SAVE earlier this year in his own search for noncitizens on his county’s voter roll. If elected secretary, Forlini said, he would fight to expand access to the database. “If we’re going to have true partners in the state on this, then we need to work together,” he said. If nothing else, he said, he would like fewer noncitizens to be allowed into the jury pools. The Department of State has previously fought against that idea, arguing that state law requires them to send counties lists of all county residents with IDs, regardless of whether they’re a citizen. As a result, some noncitizens may be summoned for jury duty — though they are not ultimately allowed to serve on juries in the U.S. under federal law. Noncitizen voting has increasingly become a Republican talking point, despite the fact that it is extremely rare. Michigan reviewed its entire voter roll last year and found only 16 noncitizens who may have voted in the 2024 election out of 8.1 million registered voters. But Republicans have argued that even a single noncitizen voter disenfranchises rightful voters. They are pushing a proposal to amend the Michigan Constitution that could appear on the November ballot this year requiring new voters to prove their citizenship with a document such as a passport or birth certificate. Democrats, meanwhile, have argued that such requirements could disenfranchise eligible voters instead. Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org .

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