Bureau of Elections responds to Senator's questions on non-citizen voting safeguards

[RandySF]

In the lead up to Election Day on Nov. 5, following a report of a University of Michigan student from China casting a ballot at an Ann Arbor polling place, Sen. Ruth Johnson (R-Holly) submitted a letter to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson inquiring on the state’s safeguards to prevent ineligible individuals from voting.

Johnson, who preceded Benson as secretary of state serving from 2011 through 2018, raised concerns about a mismatch between information about new voter registrations and information stored in federal Social Security records, facilitated through the Security Administration’s Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) system, inquiring as to how many of these individuals had voted, and questioned the integrity of the state’s system for same-day voter registration and provisions allowing individuals to register to vote by signing an affidavit in place of showing photo ID.

While Johnson pointed to 34,535 individuals whose name, date of birth and social security numbers did not match any record in the Social Security database, Jonathan Brater, director of the Michigan Bureau of Elections, wrote in his response Thursday that Johnson’s letter contained misconceptions on the function of the HAVV system.

“HAVV allows states to attempt to verify the last four digits of a social security number submitted by an applicant. HAVV cannot be used, is not used, and never has been used to verify the citizenship status of an applicant,” Brater wrote. “HAVV cannot be used for this purpose because it matches against the Social Security Administration database of social security numbers, and some non-citizens have social security numbers.”



https://michiganadvance.com/2024/11/21/bureau-of-elections-responds-to-senators-questions-on-non-citizen-voting-safeguards/

[MichMan]

1. That creates more questions than it answers

While a match to the database doesn't definitively prove whether someone is a citizen or not, I'm still not understanding why there would be 34,535 voters whose SS numbers failed to find any match with the government database. The claim that multiple incorrect inputs all trigger a non match is understandable, but 35,000 of them?

Also, there still doesn't seem to be any safeguards to prevent anyone from voting who is a non citizen as long as that person signs an affidavit misstating their status. We know that it happened at least once, and that was only discovered when the person turned themselves in.