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Police investigating after Muskegon clerk finds irregularities in voter registration applications

Meisch said no ballots were issued to any application with suspected voter registration irregularities.
Credit: 13 ON YOUR SIDE

MUSKEGON, Mich. — Police are investigating after voter irregularities were found at the City of Muskegon.

According to Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch, the office found irregularities in hundreds of applications. However, none of these irregularities resulted in ballots being sent out incorrectly.

Meisch said the office started receiving boxes of voter registrations about three weeks ago from an organized drive they were unaware of. The office received several of those boxes and estimated 6,000 applications were inside.

While most of the applications were valid, Meisch said several irregularities were recognized in a portion of them, including applications with wrong birthdays, addresses, driver’s license numbers and signatures that did not match their driver’s license.

“In all, we estimate we received several hundred applications that had such irregularities,” Meisch said.

The irregularities were detected via the office’s Qualified Voter File (QVF). The database allows voter information to be matched with information from the Secretary of State’s Office, including signature and driver’s license number.

“If this information was not correct, we called the phone number on the application to speak to the voter,” Meisch said. “Any information that we were not able to verify, we gave to the SOS Office who ran additional checks. Once this happened and we could not verify the application, the information was removed from the voter registration files.”

Meisch said no ballots were issued to any application with suspected voter registration irregularities.

Now, the origin of the irregularities is under investigation by the Michigan State Police, in tandem with the Attorney General’s Office, the Michigan Department of State and the Muskegon Police Department.

“Despite claims to the contrary, this investigation is in no way related to ballots or ballot drop boxes,” a statement from MSP reads. “None of the alleged fraudulent voter registrations resulted in voters receiving absentee ballot applications or ballots, any resulting registrations have been voided, and there is no expected impact on any election.”

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