Last month, I received an absentee ballot application to vote in Michigan’s election. The problem? I never requested one, I don’t live in the state anymore, and I’m already registered to vote in my new home state. 

Surely, I thought, my registration at least had been discontinued in Michigan’s voter database. I don’t even have an active Michigan driver’s license anymore!

Nope. I checked on the Secretary of State’s website, and my registration is still very much active. That means the only thing keeping me from committing voter fraud in next month’s election is my own conscience (and the fact that this article would be used against me in trial).

Michigan is allowed to send automatic absentee ballot applications—but only to voters on its permanent mail ballot list. In order to be put on that list, you must check a box on the application that says “Automatically send me an absent voter ballot for each future election for which I’m eligible.” The last time I voted in Michigan, it was in person. I never checked that box.

But even if I had, sending absentee applications en masse to voters who may or may not still be eligible to vote in the state is a recipe for disaster.

I share this because Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, is currently pretending the Great Lake State’s election process is bulletproof and that anyone who raises concerns about its vulnerabilities is spreading “dangerous disinformation.” 

That’s exactly how she described a question from tech mogul Elon Musk about why Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens:

The only person spreading “disinformation” here is Benson. As Michigan Enjoyer has covered previously, Michigan’s voter rolls are significantly more bloated than its Midwestern neighbors. There are, for example, tens of thousands of voters still registered in Michigan’s database who are dead—at least 3,956 of those voters have been dead for 20+ years. Instead of simply removing those voters from the state’s database, Benson went to court to avoid doing so.

And notice that in her response to Musk, Benson specifically claims there are fewer “active registered voters” than “citizens of voting age.” She’s intentionally leaving out inactive registered voters, even though inactive registered voters can and do vote, albeit more sporadically. But don’t take it from me, take it from Benson’s own website, which says a voter marked as inactive will be sent a notice, but “can still vote” until his or her name is officially cleaned from the state’s voter rolls.

So if we add Michigan’s inactive registered voters to its active registered voters, the total number of registered voters in Michigan is just under 8.5 million, which, again, can be found on the Michigan Secretary of State website. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Michigan only has about 7.9 million eligible citizens. In other words, Musk was right: Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens.

Instead of doing her due diligence to fix this glaring problem, Benson again decided she’d rather go to court in what appears to be an effort to delay cleaning Michigan’s voter rolls for as long as possible. 

After the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against Benson for being out of compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires election officials to check the state’s voter rolls every month and remove voters who are no longer qualified, Benson argued she is complying with the law because she plans to remove more than 600,000 ineligible voters… after November’s election. Many won’t be officially removed from the state’s rolls until 2027, Benson’s office admitted.

​​U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering unfortunately sided with Benson this week, which means I could continue to receive ballot applications from the state for which I am not eligible for at least the next two election cycles.

For the record, I’m not planning to take advantage of Benson’s lax enforcement. But can she honestly assure Michiganders that the hundreds of thousands of other ineligible voters on the state’s voter rolls will do the same? And if they don’t, can she guarantee that they’ll be caught and—here’s the real kicker—prosecuted?

I think we all know the answer.

Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Metro Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.