Noncitizen Voting Charges Renew Election Debate

It's all talk on a Friday. I'm Kevin D. It's coming to you from the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building. The number is 1-800-8-9-0-957. 1-800-8-5-0-W-JR. We are going to take your calls and read your text coming up at 1035. So pick up the phone and be a part of the show. Michigan's debate over election integrity just got fresh fuel. Attorney General Dana Nessel says five non-U.S. citizens have been charged with illegally voting in the 2024 presidential election with a six person is accused of registering her non-citizen husband to vote. Dana Nessel's office says it has investigated 38 suspected cases of non-citizen voting or related elections conduct dating back to 2009. Six have resulted in charges. Ten were closed without charges. 22 remain under review. This was Jocelyn Benson back in 2024, talking about the possibility of this happening. I agree as well. We're doing everything we can to ensure that non-citizens are not able to vote and that only U.S. citizens vote in our election. And it's working. There's no evidence that non-citizens are voting. If they were, it would be easy to prove since voting records are public. And despite numerous organizations, spending a lot of money to try to convince people that non-citizens are voting, none of these groups have actually been able to provide any evidence of it. Let's bring in Anthony Ferlini, McComb County Clerk, a Republican candidate for Secretary of State. Good morning. How are you? Good morning, Kevin. How are you? I'm doing well. It looks like at least now Dana Nessel's office believes there's evidence that it was happening or did happen. Well, congratulations to her, and I appreciate that because it is happening, and it kind of cracks me up when I listened to this last interview you just had with Dana Nessel. I'm sorry, with Gretchen. Jocelyn Benson. Jonathan Guy Benson, Matt. And it's like nobody's listening. I came up with this back in January this year, and we produced this evidence. One of these people that are on Dana Nessel's list actually were on our list. That's what we had said to them, and I was called reckless and irresponsible for bringing this up. And it turns out that this is exactly the case. And you know what? And this isn't the only one. We've got four others. And what's crazy, Kevin, is, you know, the federal government has confirmed these people. And one of them, according to my corporate counsel, they're saying that the state is saying one of these people that we flag is actually, they are non-citizens. But the state is saying, well, one of them is a citizen. There's a complete disconnect across the board on this. And we need to get to the bottom of it. Either the state's trying to cover this up, so it's not a big thing.

I don't know. I can't answer this. All I know is we're doing our job to flag these individuals, turn them over to the state, and we have four others. We have not heard back from these, and there's more coming. Well, my problem is that, you know, I've had Jocelyn Benson on this show, and she has told me time and again that Michigan has the safest elections ever. There's nothing to worry about whatsoever. You heard her in that clip say that, you know, there's no evidence that people who are not supposed to be voting are voting. I get the sense that they dismiss. The citizens out there that are concerned about election integrity by sort of dismissing their concerns as being irrational. And then leaving it up to the citizens to go out there and investigate and FOIA people and get records and then prove the case that their office or the Attorney General's office should be making. Instead, it seems to me, that could be wrong, but it seems to me, like they're forcing citizens to do the work they should. be doing? 100%. And I'll tell you, we should be all working in partnership. The citizens. the county, the local clerks, the Secretary of State's office should be working in partnership. Instead, what we're finding is the state's trying to prove us wrong as opposed to saying, hey, what do you got there? Let's look at this and let's try to come up with an answer. Maybe we've missed something. Maybe we need to do something a little different. Instead, it's just rose-colored glasses of what's happening out there, and that's not how you fix the election systems. You fix it by working together to find solutions. And you know what? It's never going to be perfect. There's never going to be anything perfect. But we need to work together to come up with answers to fix the system so people out on the streets. believe in our system still. And right now there's a lot of doubt because of the disinformation that's being put out there. If people, if everyone was working together like you described, I would tend to say, look, this, this proves that the system works and that we can find out when, when this happens and we can bring charges. But my problem is I don't feel like we're working together. So I get the sense that. that this to me feels like, all right, we've found five now. How many more are there? We have to keep digging to get the, you know, to get the Attorney General and Secretary of State to do their job. I don't know if that's accurate or fair or not, but it's just a perception I get.

Right. Well, listen, since the beginning of 2025 through the second quarter of this year, we have found in our jury system over a thousand people have come to us and says, hey, I'm not a U.S. citizen. I cannot serve in jury duty. Well, that should have been flagged before we got this to this point. And how many didn't come to us that were non-U.S. citizens knowing that they can't serve on jury duty, they just ignore us. Probably double that number. And then of those 40 ended up being in a qualified voter file. 40. So this is a small sampling, really a small sampling of what the problems are. And we need to get our arms around it. Fix the system. Fix what's going on. Don't ignore it. Let's fix it. That's all I'm saying is let's fix it. Let's make sure that these things don't happen because it's not just the election system. It's our jury pool. We can't let this happen anymore. I think that's what all of Michigan citizens want. They just want to know that everyone's doing their best. We understand that fraud exists, that there's a percentage. We want it to be as small as possible. And when we find it, we shut that loophole down so that people who are trying to commit fraud to have to figure something else out. And it doesn't seem like that should be pulling teeth. It seems like everyone should want to do that. What is the deal with these people who... Apparently we're testing the system to see if it worked? I can't answer that. I don't know if that's the case. That could be the case. No shame on them. In our case, we have people that are in the system if they're testing it. It's a felony. You can't do that. You can't go out there and create a crime just to see, let me rob this bank and see if I can actually get away with it. Oh, I was just testing the system. It doesn't work that way. Yeah. So the 15 suspected non-citizen votes out of 5.7 million ballots. It's a small number. What do we do with this information? Should we do bigger audits? Should we surmise that it's not? it's extraordinarily rare and not a huge problem? Well, this is what's been caught. It wouldn't have been caught these people, these 40 people in the in the voting system that we have were caught by us. I mean, who else is looking at this and who else is doing their work? And we took over 300 people off of our voting system that were already passed away at the county. And so. Who else is looking at that? That's not the county clerk's job. It's the job of the state to make sure that these are happening properly. We need to do a little bit more, get to work, get these things done, continue to work to improve processes in systems and protocols. And it's super simple to put people on their voting rolls. It seems like it takes forever to take them off. And maybe that's the way it should be, but it shouldn't be that difficult, particularly when you have proof. Do you think these cases would have been charged had it not been for the public doing the work? Well, I can tell you, ours was brought forward back in January.

It's taken this long to finally come to a point where they're going after this person in particular. But I think there needs to be a little bit more work with forward to make sure that this doesn't happen. And maybe some of these people innocently voted saying, you know, hey, yeah, you're in the system. Go ahead and vote. Well, I'm not a citizen. Once I say, you can vote. Go ahead and vote. We never should have put them in that position to create a crime. We never should have allowed that to happen. There should be better protocols put in place right up front to ensure that people are not put in a position to vote illegally. You know, if face it, if you're not a citizen and somebody tells you, yeah, you can vote and you're in the system. Well, maybe I don't know something. All right, I'll vote. And now they've created a crime and potential deportation, right? Right. So that's not what we want to put people in that situation. We need to fix the system. And that's why Citizens' Only Initiative is out there is let's fix the system up front so people don't make those mistakes. Anthony Ferlini, McComb County Clerk and Republican candidate for Secretary of State. Thank you for the conversation and the information. We appreciate it. Appreciate it. All right. Have a great weekend. Your calls are next. It's all talk. I'm Kevin Deetz.