The race for Secretary of State has been turned on its head with the surprise addition of Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, which immediately caused one fellow Democrat to drop out.
On the Republican side, one candidate recently made waves by claiming he found 15 non-citizens registered to vote, and the current Secretary of State is now investigating.
Macomb County Clerk and Republican candidate for secretary of state, Anthony Forlini, said his office noticed that non-citizens were showing up in jury pools at an alarming rate.
“Turns out, we had just under 200 people getting off jury duty because they were non-citizens,” Forlini said. “Thought to myself, ‘How can that be? How can they even be in this database?’”
Forlini directed his staff to cross-check the jury pool names with the qualified voter file and discovered something else.
“We had 14 of them on our database on QFV, really threw me, three of them voted though. Spinning this up because this is a big problem,” he said.
“With almost certainty, those numbers are filled with false positives,” said David Becker.
Becker is the founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit.
He said Forlini’s claim is something that’s popped up over the last couple of decades, rarely with malicious intent.
" It often doesn’t indicate voter fraud; it’s often fraud in court. Someone who is a citizen who claims not to be a citizen to get out of jury duty," said Becker. “Someone who commits voter fraud by claiming they’re a citizen when theyre not is committing a felony and will be deported.”
“They presented us with green cards on the other end, addresses matched up with QVF and their names matched up, and that’s how we came across this. It wasnt a blank database that we compared two databases,” said Forlini.
“It is not uncommon for people to try and get out of jury duty,” said Barb Byrum.
One of the Democratic Secretary of State candidates, Barb Byrum, has been the Ingham County Clerk for the last 13 years
She thinks Forlini alerting the press rather than the police is telling.
“If a clerk thinks a non-citizen voted, it is incumbent to send to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution -- not to score political points,” she said.
The newest Secretary of State candidate, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, didn’t weigh in specifically on the legitimacy of Forlini’s claims, saying, “People who are not eligible to vote-- should not vote. Doing so is illegal, and I will hold anyone who tries to do that accountable. Not acceptable; if it slips through cracks, hold them to the fullest extent of the law.”
The full field of candidates for Michigan’s Secretary of State includes Tim Smith, Amanda Love and Monica Yatooma, in addition to Forlini for the Republicans. For the Democrats, Suzanna Shkreli and Adam Hollier are also running, along with Gilchrist and Byrum.