Speaker Johnson Unloads After Illegals Charged With Illegal Voting

The Michigan case being cited by Speaker Mike Johnson is genuine, documented, and moving through the courts — six people, five of them noncitizens, now face criminal charges tied to the 2024 general election — but the same investigation that produced those charges also shows how rare such violations actually are, which is precisely why the two parties can look at identical facts and draw opposite conclusions.

Key Points

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged five noncitizens and one U.S. citizen on August 13 with election-law violations tied to the 2024 presidential election.
The charges span misdemeanors to felonies, including election forgery and using a computer to commit a crime, carrying penalties up to seven years.
Michigan’s own review process flagged 38 suspected cases going back to 2009; only six produced charges, ten were closed without charges, and 22 remain under review.
Speaker Johnson used the charges to renew Republican arguments for citizenship-verification laws like the SAVE Act, while Michigan officials continue to describe noncitizen voting as extremely isolated.
A separate 2024 audit of a jury-pool tip in Macomb County found most flagged “noncitizens” were false positives, illustrating why raw data-matching claims routinely overstate the problem.

What Nessel Actually Charged, and Against Whom

The August 13 announcement named six defendants. Michael Akoya, a 39-year-old lawful permanent resident, faces two 90-day misdemeanors for false statements on absentee ballot paperwork. Alondra Harker, Harami Michael, Robert Piva, and Sada Savian Basant — the last of whom reportedly resides in the United Kingdom — face charges ranging from fraudulent registration to felony counts for unqualified electors attempting to vote or registering online with a Bloomfield Hills address. The lone U.S. citizen charged, Kimberly Donato, faces election forgery and computer-crime felonies for allegedly registering her noncitizen husband online and then canceling it, claiming she was “testing the registration system for vulnerabilities.” Each case still has to survive a courtroom, where prosecutors carry the burden of proof.

These charges did not emerge from a fresh scandal; they came out of a standing referral pipeline. The Michigan Department of State forwarded 16 suspected cases from the 2024 cycle and another 22 spanning 2009 through 2025 to the Attorney General’s office. Of that total pool, six produced charges, ten were closed with no charges filed, and 22 remain under review. That ratio matters: it means the state’s own screening apparatus, working as designed, converted a comparatively small fraction of flagged cases into prosecutable conduct — evidence that the system catches violations, but also that most flags do not hold up.

How Michigan Law Treats Noncitizen Voting

Michigan’s election code is unambiguous on this point. Under MCL 168.932a, any unqualified elector who willfully offers or attempts to vote commits a felony punishable by up to four years in prison and a $2,000 fine. Registration fraud and election forgery carry their own separate penalties, which is why the charges announced against this group vary so widely — from 90-day misdemeanors to seven-year felonies — depending on whether the conduct involved a false statement, an actual cast ballot, or manipulation of the online registration system itself. The statute makes no allowance for intent framed as a “test” of system vulnerabilities, which is the defense Donato has reportedly offered; whether that argument survives prosecution is now a matter for a Michigan court, not a talking point.

Why the Same Facts Produce Opposite Narratives

Speaker Johnson’s response treated the charges as confirmation of a systemic vulnerability in battleground-state elections, framing Democratic resistance to citizenship-verification measures as a “clear and present danger” to election integrity. Michigan officials, including Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, have consistently pushed back on the scale implied by that framing. Benson’s office has noted that the 15 to 16 confirmed noncitizen voting instances from the 2024 cycle amount to roughly 0.00028 percent of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast statewide — a proportion state officials describe as “extremely isolated and rare” even as they continue prosecuting the cases that meet the legal bar. Both statements are true simultaneously: the violations are real, and they are numerically minuscule relative to the electorate.

This is not the first time a Michigan noncitizen-voting claim has drawn national attention only to shrink under scrutiny. In April 2024, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini cross-referenced roughly 200 individuals excused from jury duty as noncitizens against the state’s Qualified Voter File and claimed 14 were registered, with three having voted. When Benson’s office investigated the 15 names Forlini provided, it found only three had any voting history at all — one was a U.S. citizen who voted legally, one was an apparent noncitizen whose registration had already been canceled years earlier, and one remained under review. Election-research groups have repeatedly warned that jury-questionnaire data is a poor tool for identifying citizenship status, since people sometimes falsely claim noncitizen status specifically to dodge jury service, generating false positives rather than uncovered fraud.

The Larger Pattern Behind the Headlines

A separate 2020 case out of Muskegon, repeatedly invoked in broader claims about “widespread” fraud, followed the same arc. Michigan State Police confirmed that a Democrat-affiliated canvassing operation had submitted forged registration forms to inflate productivity numbers for gift-card incentives, but the agency was explicit that no fraudulent registrations were ever processed and no resulting ballots were cast. The FBI closed that investigation in 2025 without finding evidence of a coordinated effort to alter an election outcome. Nessel’s office, which had referred the case for investigation, has been equally clear that the episode does not support claims of rigged elections — while simultaneously prosecuting the newer, unrelated Washtenaw County and statewide cases now working through the courts.

This tension — real, prosecutable violations coexisting with a system that overwhelmingly gets voter rolls right — is the throughline of nearly every noncitizen-voting controversy in recent memory, in Michigan and elsewhere. It is also why a Michigan-led ballot initiative gathered more than 750,000 signatures seeking mandatory voter ID and systematic voter-file audits, and why federal proposals like the SAVE Act keep resurfacing in Congress. Supporters argue that even a small number of confirmed violations justifies tighter verification; state election officials counter that broader ID mandates address a problem so small it is already being caught, at the cost of added friction for millions of legitimate voters. Both positions rest on the same charging document — they simply weigh the risk differently.

What Comes Next

The six Michigan cases now proceed through ordinary criminal court process, where each defendant is entitled to contest the charges and where conviction is not guaranteed. Politically, expect the case to keep functioning as a proof point on both sides of the citizenship-verification debate — cited by Republicans in Congress pushing federal ID requirements, and cited by Michigan election officials as evidence their existing referral system already works without new legislation. The more durable lesson, borne out across the Muskegon, Macomb County, and Washtenaw County episodes alike, is that claims about noncitizen voting demand the same discipline every time: distinguish a documented, charged case from a raw data-matching tip, because history shows the two produce very different numbers.