New Michigan Voter Rules Pose Dire Threat to Election Integrity

For Americans concerned about election integrity, a new set of proposed rules from Michigan Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson should be a five-alarm fire. These rules, filed late last month, threaten to undermine the transparency and accuracy of Michigan’s voter rolls – potentially affecting elections nationwide.

Here’s just a few of the outrageous provisions that Americans should know about:

Twenty Years to Remove Inactive Voters

The new rules would allow inactive voter registrations to remain on the rolls for 20 years. Under federal law, states may remove inactive voters after only four years.

With 28.2 million Americans moving annually, this means ballots could be mailed to addresses where voters haven’t lived in decades. According to the Michigan Fair Elections Institute (MFEI), Michigan already has more than 558,000 inactive registrations, and inactive registrations are ripe for voter fraud.

Benson’s new rules threaten to make the problem exponentially worse.

Blocking Citizen Oversight

The new rules also create impossible barriers for citizens trying to ensure accurate voter rolls. They demand “personal knowledge” of voter ineligibility to challenge an invalid registration – excluding common sources like death records, public records, and change-of-address databases – even from the U.S. Postal Service. Plus, the rules repeatedly indicate that cleaning the rolls is optional for the clerk, and they force clerks to document “reliable” reasons for sending a notice to a registrant’s address to verify accuracy. Only in-person clerk canvassing – clerks going door to door – is considered reliable.

The rules impose expensive and time-consuming hurdles as well, raising the cost of challenging 100 suspect registrations to $2,300. The result is that basic citizen oversight becomes an enormously (and likely prohibitively) costly endeavor by design.

Intimidating Poll Watchers

Perhaps most troubling, the rules threaten poll challengers – everyday citizens who volunteer to observe voting and report irregularities – with vague accusations of bias based on subjective “appearance” or “impression” standards. In effect, the rules would punish vigilant poll challengers for reporting fraud and force them to prove a negative; i.e., that they did not file the challenge for biased reasons, rather than just stating the valid reasons for the challenge.

With 1.2 million absentee ballots cast in Michigan’s 2024 election, poll watchers serve as the public’s eyes and ears. They are essential to providing the checks and balances our Founding Fathers built into our constitutional republic’s system of government to keep it of the people, by the people, and for the people. These new rules appear designed to silence citizen participation through intimidation.

Shielding Overseas Voters from Verification

Everyone agrees that service members stationed overseas should have a voice in our elections. But the new Michigan rules appear to create a protected class of overseas civilian voters exempt from standard verification—despite Michigan’s Attorney General explicitly stating in Opinion #7322 that overseas civilians without military credentials don’t qualify for such exemptions. This contradicts both federal law and the attorney general’s own guidance – issued at the request of Secretary Benson.

What You Can Do

Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) has filed a formal objection urging the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules to reject these rules entirely. The committee will review this objection in the coming weeks. But there is little they are likely to do, as the committee is split 50-50 and requires a quorum to meet and vote. Often, no Democrats show up, so for several months, JCAR has lacked a quorum.

Americans who have witnessed the evolution of our democratic institutions understand that election integrity isn’t partisan – it’s foundational. Transparent, accurate voter rolls and citizen oversight are how we ensure every legal vote counts. No illegal ballot should dilute a legitimate vote.

Concerned citizens in Michigan can contact their state representatives and urge them to oppose Rule Set 2025-13 ST. For more information, you can visit the MFEI and PIME websites.

Patrice Johnson is the Chairperson and Founder of the Michigan Fair Elections Institute and Pure Integrity Michigan Elections.