A Republican candidate for Michigan Secretary of State is warning that local clerks in Macomb County are being overwhelmed by fraudulent voter registration cards, claiming that roughly nine out of every ten forms they receive are not legitimate — and that one clerk was handed 47 registration cards for the same individual.
Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County Clerk now running for the state’s top elections post, released a video on social media on Sept. 18 titled “This is not how things should be run,” according to a report by The Gateway Pundit. In the video, Forlini said the clerks he works with are furious about the volume of suspect paperwork landing on their desks ahead of the upcoming election.
5,000 Cards and Counting
Forlini said more than 5,000 voter registration cards have been dumped on Macomb County — many for people already on the voter rolls, with signatures that don’t match the state’s Qualified Voter File, and turned in by paid collectors submitting what he described as junk. The cards, he said, continue to arrive.
He recounted one exchange with a local clerk that he called a stunning illustration of the problem. “One of my clerks said, allegedly, there were 47 for one person,” Forlini said.
The candidate said the clerks’ assessment of the material they’re receiving is that nine out of ten forms are not legitimate — a figure he characterized not as a paperwork hiccup but as evidence of a broader breakdown.
“Five thousand came through our county — and they’re still coming in from organizations and groups that are out to make a buck for themselves, for the people that are doing it!” Forlini said in the video.
Forlini also framed the issue as a drain on local election workers, arguing that forcing clerks to spend hours sifting legitimate registrations from suspect ones pulls them away from running elections themselves. “That’s a lot of time suck, guys. It’s a lot of time suck for your local clerks, for the people that are trying to do our elections, trying to make our elections good,” he said. “They work hard. They work really hard. We need to support them.”
A Pledge to Close the ‘Hole’ in the Law
Forlini said the current system allows virtually anyone to submit registration forms on behalf of others, and he argued that isn’t how the law was intended to work. As Secretary of State, he said, he would try to identify what is flawed in Michigan law and how registrations are processed.
“I’m going to try to figure out what is flawed in the law and how we’re registering people, because this isn’t the way the law was designed to be — where anybody can just turn in registrations for anybody, even though the clerks are claiming 9 out of 10 are not legitimate,” he said.
He added that the status quo is not how elections should be run, and that if elected he would find the hole in the law and close it.
Background: Macomb County and Michigan’s Registration Battles
Macomb County, a blue-collar stronghold north of Detroit, has been a frequent focus of election-integrity disputes in Michigan. The county helped deliver Michigan — and the presidency — to Donald Trump in 2016 before the state flipped to Joe Biden in 2020, and since then it has produced some of the state’s most vocal activists on voting issues.
Forlini, a Republican, is on the ballot this cycle for Secretary of State, seeking to replace Democrat Jocelyn Benson, who has held the office since 2019. His candidacy comes as Michigan’s voter rolls remain a live political battleground, with Republicans arguing the state has failed to maintain accurate lists and Democrats countering that claims of widespread registration fraud are overstated and used to justify tighter voting rules.
The Gateway Pundit reported that in the prior month, Trump addressed a voter registration fraud operation that the outlet says operated in at least 68 Michigan cities under the name GBI Strategies, also referred to as Empower Michigan. The outlet has previously reported that Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel did not disclose an investigation into that operation — an inquiry that began before the November 2020 election — to the public or to local clerks.
According to that prior reporting, an untold number of fake registrations may have been mailed from a hotel and dropped off at local clerks’ offices while a statewide investigation involving the Secretary of State’s and Attorney General’s offices was underway without clerks being informed.
What Comes Next
Forlini is not presenting himself as a confrontational candidate, but his message in the Sept. 18 video was pointed: the registration pipeline, in his view, is being abused, and local clerks are paying the price. Whether his claims about the scale of the problem are borne out — and how state election officials respond — will likely be central to the Secretary of State race in the weeks ahead.
The specific figure of 47 registrations for one individual, and the clerks’ estimate that nine in ten forms are invalid, were attributed by Forlini to local clerks in his county and relayed in his video. Those claims have not been independently confirmed in the source material.
Michigan voters will decide the Secretary of State contest in the upcoming election, with control over the state’s election administration and voter roll maintenance hanging on the outcome.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/michigan-county-clerk-9-10-voter-regisrations-received/