Michigan’s Voter Rolls Are a Mess

In September 2020, Detroit native William T. Bradley submitted a mail-in ballot to cast his vote in the presidential election. The only problem was Bradley had been dead for months, and the ballot had been wrongly filed under his name. According to Michigan election officials, the ballot was supposed to have been attributed to Bradley’s son, who shares the same name.

The instance was resolved and written off as one of many clerical errors that occurred during the 2020 election—errors that were exacerbated by the sudden and widespread switch to mail-in voting that accompanied the pandemic. But it was an error that could—and should—have been easily prevented if Michigan election officials had been doing their jobs.

That job includes regularly cleaning the state’s voter rolls by removing registered voters who have died or moved away. Michigan does not do this nearly as much as is legally required under the National Voter Registration Act. The NVRA requires Michigan’s officials to check the state’s voter rolls every month and remove voters who are no longer qualified. An audit in 2022 confirmed this was not being done.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was even sent a detailed list of deceased voters still on the state’s voter rolls ahead of the 2020 election, but she refused to do anything about it. Then, when the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that compiled the list, filed suit against her in 2021, Benson decided she’d rather fight the issue in court than simply remove the dead voters from Michigan’s database.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report should have raised alarm bells. The group found that nearly 26,000 dead Michigan residents were still considered active voters by the state. Of those, 23,663 had been dead for at least five years, 17,479 had been dead for at least a decade, and 3,956 had been dead for at least 20 years.