State Rep. Rachelle Smit, R-Martin, released the following statement after Attorney General Dana Nessel today charged five non-citizens with election crimes following their participation in the 2024 election. The announcement comes after Smit and other Michigan lawmakers sent a letter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, urging him to lead the U.S. Senate in passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo ID when voting.

“How many non-citizens will have to vote in our elections before Democrats recognize it as the crisis it is? I truly believe Michigan is the epicenter of the problem. We have a Democrat Secretary of State self-reporting that non-citizens voted under her leadership and then a Democrat Attorney General charging those non-citizens because the crimes were too blatant to ignore. Can you imagine how many more non-citizens we would find voting in our elections if we had a serious Attorney General or Secretary of State who wouldn’t treat the crisis like a non-issue?

“The charges filed today are just the tip of the iceberg, and further underscore exactly why the U.S. Senate must approve the SAVE Act to safeguard our elections and ensure only U.S. citizens are voting in our elections. We must remember that these are just the cases where the individual voting was caught. How many others are doing the exact same thing and just escaping the law?

“The charges today raise more serious questions about a system we all know to have serious flaws. Passing the SAVE act in Congress will help, just like some of the voter security measures we’ve passed in Michigan that had subsequently been held up in the state Senate. Unfortunately, the reality is that you have one party that wants to see secure elections and another who benefits from the chaos. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Democrats throughout our country would want to protect the broken system that got them to where they are today.”

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