House Election Integrity Committee hears testimony on voter-roll irregularities and bill to prompt longtime inactive registrants

The Michigan House Committee on Election Integrity on an unspecified May date heard testimony alleging widespread irregularities in the state’s qualified voter file (QVF) and considered House Bill 4356, a proposal to require a mailed notice to voters who have not voted in 10 years before their registrations can be placed into challenge status.

Fani Mantravati, founder of the nonprofit CheckMyVote and the creator of the website checkmyvote.org, testified that his group’s analysis of the May 1, 2025 QVF snapshot shows what he described as “bloated” rolls and a range of anomalies, and urged greater transparency from the Michigan Department of State. “Transparency is crucial for public trust in election outcomes,” Mantravati told the committee, and he cited examples from his site of duplicate records, registrations linked to vacant lots, registrations lacking apartment numbers, and entries with implausible birth years.

Mantravati said his monthly QVF FOIA requests and the tools on checkmyvote.org have identified specific totals and examples he said merit further scrutiny. He told the committee that the May 2025 QVF snapshot shows about 8,190,000 registered records while he compared that to a July 2023 U.S. Census estimate of about 7,900,000 people of voting age. “So where is this bloat coming from?” he asked, and cited a count of 3,483 duplicates found by his group. He also described volunteers using public records and cemetery databases to flag likely deceased registrants and claimed some records appear to be restored in subsequent monthly QVF snapshots after clerks have removed them, a phenomenon he called a “Lazarus effect.”

Mantravati displayed several individual examples from his website,…