Susan J. Demas

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization that reports on voting access and election administration in the US Sign up here for the free Votebeat Michigan newsletter.

A non-U.S. citizen faces felony charges in Michigan after he allegedly voted at an Ann Arbor polling place over the weekend, state and local officials said Wednesday.

That voter – reported by The Detroit News and confirmed by the secretary of state’s office to be a 19-year-old University of Michigan student from China — could face up to nine years in prison if convicted. Only US citizens are eligible to vote in federal and state elections.

Under Michigan’s ballot secrecy protections, once a voter casts his or her personal ballot, often by entering it in a tabulator, it usually cannot be identified among other ballots and later retrieved or voided.

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

“Let’s be clear: voting records are public — any non-citizen who attempts to vote fraudulently in Michigan will put themselves at great risk and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Benson and Savit said in their statement.

Michiganders who register to vote or apply for a ballot must sign an affidavit stating that they are citizens. Lying on these forms is a felony — one of two charges facing the ineligible voter in Ann Arbor. The other is because he was an unauthorized voter trying to vote.

Voting by non-citizens is extremely rare. Election integrity officials and researchers have only discovered several dozen examples by the vote of non-citizens from across the country over several years, and those examples are usually prosecuted, as officials plan to do in the Washtenaw County case.

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

“Most of the time, elections don’t come down to one vote,” said Joshua Douglas, a professor of election law at the University of Kentucky. “It’s unfortunate if a ballot is counted, it shouldn’t be. … But one vote that should not be counted is not proof that there are thousands of votes in a similar situation.”

Douglas noted that non-citizens are unlikely to risk voting illegally because they know that if caught, they will face both criminal charges and the potential loss of their legal immigration status.

Still, conservative officials and activists across the country have argued that widespread non-citizen voting is a pressing threat and have looked for examples of non-citizens registering or voting illegally, particularly in swing states. Michael Morley, a professor at Florida State University who teaches election law, said this election officials in Republican-leaning states have done “thorough” reviews of their voter rolls, in some places sparking litigation from the Justice Department.

“The potential non-citizens that election officials found nationally were in the hundreds or maybe thousands out of millions of registered people,” Morley said of the effort. And even those numbers could be overstated, he said, because they could include people who were flagged as noncitizens but were naturalized, or people who are otherwise not properly matched between the voter rolls and the database of reference, which means that their citizenship was incorrect. questioned.

Targeting the vote of non-citizens can quickly escalate into a kind of witch hunt, Morley said, where the worst case scenario is someone making assumptions about a person’s citizenship based on how they speak or skin color.

The more immediate problem, he said, was the risk that the alleged non-citizen vote in Ann Arbor could be turned into disinformation about the general election.