Michigan election officials say [1] a new state review confirms the voter rolls are “secure and accurate.” But that’s not what the report actually says. In fact, the words “safe” or “secure” or “accurate” don’t appear in the report at all when describing the voter rolls.
Nevertheless, the Michigan Department of State still celebrated an Aug. 28 Office of Auditor General report as evidence that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s reforms have made Michigan’s voter rolls “more accurate than ever before” and touted that they are “complete, up to date, and accurate.”
The department highlighted that 99.99% of Qualified Voter File records contained complete information and 99.7% of records compared between the QVF and the state’s driver database matched. Hooray! The boxes were all filled out!
But the report itself comes with considerably more fine print. The main takeaway that Benson’s buddies are ignoring: the report was a result of looking at process, not the accuracy of the information.
Auditors found 653 registered electors listed as older than 122. That’s noteworthy considering the oldest verified person in history, Jeanne Calment, died at 122 back in 1997.
And then there’s the 18,523 registered electors within QVF that were identified as non-citizens in CARS. The report concluded, “Our review demonstrates that the citizenship field alone in CARS is not sufficient to determine citizenship and additional confirmation of citizen status should occur prior to canceling individuals in QVF.”
The report also revisited four deficiencies identified in the Auditor General’s 2022 audit: reconciliation between driver records and the QVF, electronic pollbook security controls, oversight and reporting of post-election audits, and post-election audit training and certification.
The Auditor General explicitly warned that this examination was not a full performance audit, did not audit the accuracy of the underlying CARS, vital-records or QVF data and expressed no opinion on the overall effectiveness of the procedures examined.
So Michigan voters are being told the voter rolls are “secure and accurate,” but the Auditor General’s report doesn’t actually make that determination. It examined selected procedures, not whether the underlying information in the QVF is factually correct, and it specifically declined to offer an opinion on the overall effectiveness of those procedures. In other words, the state may be celebrating a clean bill of health, but the auditors never actually issued one.