Five noncitizens got hit with criminal charges for casting ballots in Michigan's 2024 general election.
Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped the hammer on Thursday, according to reports, revealing that her office filed charges against five individuals who lacked U.S. citizenship but allegedly voted anyway. On top of that, a sixth person, an actual American citizen, was also charged for supposedly registering their noncitizen spouse as a voter.
Here's where the numbers get wild. The Michigan Department of State sent 16 suspected noncitizen voting cases from the November 2024 contest to Nessel's office throughout 2025. Then in 2026, another 22 cases landed on her desk covering elections stretching all the way back to 2009. Out of those 38 total referrals, only six produced criminal charges. Ten got closed without any action, and 22 are still being reviewed.
The five accused noncitizens include lawful permanent residents, someone with limited alien resident status, and a resident of the United Kingdom. None of them were American citizens. The charges they're facing run the gamut from misdemeanors to full blown felonies, including making false statements on absentee ballot paperwork, fraudulent voter registration, election law forgery, perjury, and trying to vote without being qualified. If convicted, they could be looking at anything from 90 days behind bars to multiple years in state prison.
Every single noncitizen voter identified through this process, whether charged or not, has had their registration wiped from the rolls.
Nessel came out swinging in her official statement, saying her office has always treated election crimes with the utmost seriousness. She emphasized that while noncitizen voting remains extremely rare, her team investigates every single claim and holds violators accountable. She also noted that the charges reflect both the gravity of the allegations and the enormous consequences of casting an illegal ballot, whether someone did it to "test" security systems or to actually influence an election.
Interestingly, not every referral turned out to be what it seemed. Among the closed cases, investigators discovered that two of the people flagged were actually U.S. citizens all along. Another was presumed to hold citizenship based on an early international adoption where the paperwork was incomplete. A fourth individual turned out to be a federally recognized American Indian who was born in Canada and lacked both citizenship and the right to vote.
Nessel acknowledged that some investigations proved tricky because federal agencies provided limited access to citizenship verification records.
To put all of this in perspective, these five alleged noncitizen voters cast their ballots among more than 5.7 million total votes submitted in Michigan's 2024 general election. That's a fraction of a fraction, but Nessel clearly wants to send a message that even one illegal vote gets prosecuted.
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