Michigan's attorney general has charged five noncitizens and one U.S. citizen with election crimes tied to the 2024 presidential race, and House Speaker Mike Johnson says the case proves Democrats are standing in the way of secure elections.
Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the charges after her office reviewed 38 suspected cases of noncitizen voting or related conduct spanning 2009 to 2025. Six of those cases produced criminal charges. Ten were closed without charges. Twenty-two remain under active review. The defendants range from permanent residents living in Michigan suburbs to a 29-year-old noncitizen residing in the United Kingdom who allegedly registered and cast a ballot using a Michigan address.
More than 5.7 million ballots were cast in Michigan during the November 2024 general election. Nessel's office described the charged cases as rare but prosecutable, a framing that drew a sharp political response from Johnson, who seized on the charges to renew his push for federal citizenship-verification requirements at the ballot box.
Johnson posted on X Thursday, linking the Michigan prosecutions to noncitizen voter-registration failures in New Jersey and framing both as evidence of a systemic problem Democrats refuse to address.
Fox News Digital reported that Johnson called the situation a "clear and present danger to the integrity of our elections, and our Republic." His full statement left little room for ambiguity about where he places the blame:
"From New Jersey to Michigan, the evidence continues to mount: Illegal aliens are registering and VOTING in American elections. Democrats know this, which is why they want OPEN BORDERS and OPPOSE voter ID."
Johnson added that "all Americans DESERVE secure elections, and Republicans are the ones fighting to make it happen." The statement fits a broader GOP midterm strategy centered on election integrity and border security, two issues Johnson has made central to his political operation heading into the next cycle.
Democrats and some state election officials have long argued that noncitizen voting is statistically negligible and that existing safeguards catch most violations. Nessel herself described the cases as "rare." But "rare" is not "zero," and the Michigan charges put specific names, specific methods, and specific felony counts on the record, making the abstract debate considerably more concrete.
The defendants used a range of tactics, from absentee ballots to in-person voting to a federal registration system designed for Americans living abroad. Each case tells a different story about how the safeguards failed.
Robert Piva, 67, a permanent resident from Roseville, Michigan, allegedly voted early in October 2024. He faces charges of election law perjury, attempting to vote while unqualified, and fraudulent registration. Piva claimed his vote was an "experiment" concerning voter fraud, an explanation that did not prevent prosecutors from filing charges.
Michael Akioya, 39, a permanent resident from Oak Park, Michigan, allegedly made false statements on an absentee voter application and ballot envelope during the 2024 election. Alondra Harker, 26, described as a limited-term alien resident from Three Rivers, Michigan, allegedly registered and voted in person. Harker faces a misdemeanor fraudulent-registration charge punishable by up to 90 days in jail.
Harumi Michael, 60, a permanent resident living in Wolverine Lake, Michigan, allegedly registered and voted in nearby Commerce Township. She faces the heaviest charge sheet of any defendant in the group: three felonies, two counts of election forgery and one count of attempting to vote while unqualified, plus one misdemeanor.
The most unusual case belongs to Basanth Sadasivian, 29, a noncitizen living in the United Kingdom. Sadasivian allegedly registered and voted in the 2024 election through the Federal Post Card Application system, a process normally used by U.S. citizens stationed or living overseas, using a Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, address. He faces a felony charge of attempting to vote while unqualified, punishable by up to four years in prison.
The sixth defendant, Kimberley DiDonato, 60, of Rose Township, Michigan, is a U.S. citizen. Authorities say she posed as her noncitizen husband to register him online. DiDonato claimed she wanted to test system vulnerabilities before asking to cancel the registration. She faces charges of election forgery and computer crime. Whether her husband has been separately charged is unclear from the available record.
Nessel, a Democrat, framed the charges as proof that Michigan takes election integrity seriously regardless of how infrequent the violations may be. She stated in her office's press release:
"In my office, we've always taken election crimes seriously and prosecute attacks on our voting systems to the fullest extent of the law. We're upholding election integrity by investigating all claims of noncitizen voters, as rare as they are, and holding bad actors accountable when they refuse to abide by the laws that keep our elections safe and secure."
But Nessel also pointed to a problem that complicates her own office's work. She noted that "the federal government has not always provided easy or open access to certain necessary citizenship records," and that her investigators "had to spend considerable time and effort coaxing cooperation from the federal agencies." That admission raises a fair question: how many of the 22 cases still under active review remain open because federal agencies dragged their feet on sharing data?
Nessel also acknowledged that citizenship determinations are not always straightforward. Four people referred to her office for possible prosecution were ultimately declined. Two turned out to be U.S. citizens. One was an American citizen through international adoption. One was a federally recognized American Indian born in Canada. Six additional cases were closed without charges because investigators found no evidence of criminal intent or identified potential registration errors rather than deliberate fraud.
Those numbers matter for context. They show the system does catch some false positives. But they also show that out of 38 reviewed cases, six produced criminal charges, a rate that is hard to dismiss as trivial when the integrity of a presidential election in a battleground state is at stake.
President Trump signed executive orders in March 2025 and March 2026 directing federal agencies to strengthen citizenship verification for elections and to give states greater access to citizenship and immigration records. His administration also backed legislation requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, a measure that has drawn fierce opposition from congressional Democrats who argue it would suppress eligible voters.
The tension between those two positions is exactly what Johnson highlighted in his post. If Nessel's own investigators struggled to verify citizenship because federal agencies were slow to cooperate, the case for mandatory data-sharing and proof-of-citizenship requirements grows stronger, not weaker. The Justice Department has already warned all 50 states that allowing noncitizens to vote could trigger criminal prosecution, a signal that the federal posture on enforcement has shifted.
Democrats have resisted voter-ID and citizenship-verification mandates on the grounds that they create barriers for lawful voters. But that argument runs into the reality Nessel's own charging decisions expose: without reliable verification tools, states are left prosecuting violations after the fact, after the ballots have already been counted. Prevention is cheaper, faster, and fairer than prosecution.
Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin's own reported admission that the SAVE Act would make it "hard for any Democrat" to win only deepens skepticism about why Democratic leaders oppose citizenship-verification reforms. If the concern were truly about voter access rather than partisan advantage, the political cost of verification would be irrelevant.
Johnson, meanwhile, continues to press the issue from the Speaker's chair. His legislative strategy and growing list of floor wins have kept election security near the top of the House GOP agenda, even as internal tensions over other priorities simmer.
State officials and media commentators will point out that six criminal cases against a backdrop of 5.7 million ballots amounts to a fraction of a fraction. That is mathematically true. It is also beside the point.
Election integrity does not rest on volume. It rests on whether the rules apply equally and whether the system is designed to prevent violations before they happen. A permanent resident who calls his illegal vote an "experiment," a noncitizen living in Britain who registers through a federal application system meant for overseas Americans, and a U.S. citizen who allegedly games the online registration portal to sign up her noncitizen husband, these are not statistical noise. They are specific, prosecutable breakdowns in a system that millions of lawful voters depend on.
Twenty-two cases remain under active review. The final number could grow. And the federal data-sharing problems Nessel described suggest that some violations may never surface at all, not because they did not happen, but because the tools to detect them were not available in time.
When Democrats oppose voter ID, resist citizenship-verification mandates, and fight data-sharing between federal immigration agencies and state election offices, they are not protecting voter access. They are protecting the gap, the space between the rules on paper and the enforcement on the ground where violations go undetected and uncorrected until long after the votes have been counted, if they are caught at all.
