To Prevent Fraud, Count Same-Day Registration Votes as Provisional Ballots

An alleged illegal vote by a Chinese national in Michigan was counted in the 2024 election. It wouldn’t have if he was forced to cast a provisional ballot.

Election Day 2024 may have delivered a new hope for the nation, but it also revealed some serious issues in our election infrastructure.

Case-in-point: An instance in Michigan where an alleged non-U.S. citizen’s illegal vote was counted, a scenario that could be avoided if states forced same-day voter registrants to cast provisional ballots. Same-day registration—a policy that allows someone to register to vote and casting a ballot on Election Day—is intrinsically vulnerable to voter fraud and should be abolished. But adding this safeguard would at least allow election clerks to catch bad actors before their votes are tallied.

On October 27, an unnamed Chinese student registered to vote in Ann Arbor, Michigan using their University of Michigan student ID, signed an affidavit that they are a U.S. citizen, and cast a ballot. On October 30, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit brought felony charges against the student for perjury and voting as an unauthorized elector after an election clerk alerted authorities that the student is not a U.S. citizen.

The irretrievable vote, however, still counts regardless of whether the student is found guilty.

(RELATED: Democrats' "Freedom to Vote Act" is the Death of Free Elections)

A Terrible Policy

In 2018, Michigan adopted a constitutional amendment allowing no-excuse absentee voting and same-day registration. It is one of 28 states that allows the latter.

Same-day registration creates unnecessary liabilities. It makes it easier for duplicate voting, as voters can register and cast ballots at multiple locations during early voting or election day.

It creates headaches for election workers, because without knowing how many voters they will have to register and process they don’t know how many workers they will need.

It also makes it easier for ineligible voters and non-citizens to vote as this Chinese student did.

This problem is especially acute in Michigan where the state has half a million more registered voters than voting-age residents—one of the largest imbalances in the country thanks to automatic voter registration and the difficulty of removing inactive voters from the roles once they register. All but three counties with more than 50,000 residents have over 100 percent registration.

Same-day registration creates additional liability for local elections, which can be decided by a handful of votes. It wouldn’t cost much to bus in voters who are residents in a neighboring county who swear affidavits that they are eligible to register. The fear of prosecution obviously dissuades this from happening often, but it doesn’t prevent it. With same-day registration, people could flee the state or country before local law enforcement realizes they broke the law, or politicians could mislead non-citizen immigrants into believing their legal status entitles them to vote in local elections—something some towns do allow.

The Left centers its argument for same-day voter registration on the belief that getting as many warm bodies to the polls as possible strengthens democracy. For at least a decade, Democrats have aggressively pushed bringing “millions of new voters onto the rolls,” which they expect will drive up Democratic turnout. This can be accomplished two ways—through illegal voting and dragging reluctant, low-propensity, low-information citizens to the polls.

The Democratic Party’s “reforms” to accomplish this mirror those of the Communist Party USA’s almost exactly. The Democrats’ For the People Act would force automatic registration and same-day registration on all 50 states, which would flood the rolls with non-citizens and ineligible voters who are undetectable until after they’ve already voted.

But besides illegal votes, same-day mass registration harms the democratic process. Republican strategist Matt Gagnon argued during Maine’s debate to repeal same-day registration in 2011 against people being “badgered and dragged to the polls on election day by frantic activists.”

The only people I want anywhere near a ballot box are those who have demonstrated they are actually invested enough in the process that they want to vote. . . . I want the act of voting to be easy, but just hard enough that a voter has to actually want to vote to be able to do so. Asking someone to register two days ahead of time is not an unreasonable requirement, but such a system does mean you have to think about voting before you can actually vote. 

Thankfully, the Ann Arbor clerk realized this Chinese student is likely not a U.S. citizen, and if convicted, the student will hopefully be prosecuted and deported. However, it’s unrealistic to expect the clerk to have caught the student before the ballot was cast, considering the individual provided a photo ID and signed an affidavit declaring themself a U.S. citizen.

If the Left convinces a majority of a state’s voters to make it easier for procrastinators to vote, counting same-day registrants’ votes as provisional ballots would allow clerks to retrieve illegal votes and discard them, which avoids disenfranchising eligible American voters.

(READ MORE: The People Have Spoken: Only Citizens Should Vote in America)