Did you know: Michigan is ranked 5th in the nation by the Federal Election Assistance Commission for the work done by our Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the Bureau of Elections to ensure accurate voter registration rolls.

Don’t believe all the GOP BS and lies that you may be hearing from convicted felon and “fascist to the core” Donald Trump, racist conspiracy theorist J.D. Vance, Michigan’s top election denier Pete Hoekstra and other MAGA extremists.

As Hoekstra and Michigan Republicans especially continue to spread their dangerous election conspiracy theories to undermine our democracy, it’s clear they don’t believe that their candidates are capable of winning a free and fair election.

Here are the facts:

Secretary Benson and the Bureau of Elections staff have done more in the last five years to improve the accuracy of our voter rolls than in the previous two decades, when the office was controlled by Republicans (Candice Miller, Terri Lyn Land and Ruth Johnson), who held the office from 1995 to 2019.

Voter registrations are canceled primarily for one of four reasons:

• A voter moves away from their voting jurisdiction.
• A voter dies.
• A voter registration is identified as a duplicate.
• A voter requests that his or her registration be canceled.

When election mail (such as a voter information card or absent voter ballot application) sent to a voter by a clerk is returned by the U.S. Postal Service as undeliverable, clerks use this as initial information that the voter may have moved. The clerk sends a notice of cancellation to the voter’s address in Michigan. Michigan also is partnering with other states to ID and remove voters who have moved. If the voter does not respond and does not have any voting activity by the second even-year federal election following the notice, the voter’s registration is canceled.

Michigan uses voter registration data and Social Security death data to identify and remove voters who have died.

State and local election officials also were able to identity a significant number of registered voters who appeared to have changed address through the statewide mailing of absent voter ballot applications in 2020, the first statewide election mailing in at least a decade.

This and more enabled the Bureau of Elections to cancel more than 800,000 outdated records since 2019 and identify more than 600,000 others slated for cancellation in 2025 and 2027 once the legally required two-federal election cycle period has passed.

State and federal law require voters who are inactive because they may have moved to stay on the rolls until the 2-federal cycle waiting period has passed – a period of time that could be up to four years.

Learn about all this and more at the state of Michigan Election Fact Center.