The documents posted by the White House on Thursday include multiple interviews conducted by the F.B.I. into an organization that was registering voters in Muskegon, a city on the state’s western border. In the interviews, which had not previously been made public, former employees of the organization said they were encouraged to fill out fake information on voter registration forms in order to achieve quotas and get paid.
This investigation has been well known to the public. In October of 2020, the local clerk in Muskegon told local media that her office caught hundreds of “irregular” voter registration applications, but that none of the voter registration forms that had been flagged as “irregular” had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly.
The matter was referred to the police. In 2023, local media reported that state officials in Michigan had found evidence that scores of 2020 voter registration applications in Muskegon were “clearly fraudulent.” But they did not attempt to bring charges against individuals or the organization because the investigation had been referred to the F.B.I.
Officials at the time said that the investigation in Muskegon was an example of election security working as it should, with an election official noticing irregularities, notifying authorities and opening an investigation. There is no indication that any of the fraudulent voter registration forms resulted in a fake voter obtaining a ballot — or submitting it.
That is because voter registration forms are processed by local, county and state election officials to ensure the registrant is an eligible voter. If a form had a fabricated Social Security number, as one of the people interviewed by the F.B.I. claimed, that would have been caught by local election officials.
In September 2025, the F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”
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