Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is sending out “important election information” to register absentee voters in places they haven’t lived in decades.

“There is so much at stake in this election,” Whitmer wrote in an unsolicited letter to Cynthia Paulson in Marquette. “Our freedoms are at risk, and the best way to look out for your community is to cast a vote in November.”

The letter points to the cost of living, abortion access, and voting rights at stake in 2024, and suggests “you and your neighbors will determine the direction of our community and our state.”

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“All Michigan voters can securely vote from home by using the enclosed application to request a vote-by-mail ballot,” the letter read. “Voting not only ensures your voice is heard but makes sure we have leaders who truly represent our communities and ideals.”

It urges Paulson to “return the enclosed vote-by-mail ballot application today.”

If Paulson followed through, however, that would be illegal.

Paulson, after all, isn’t even her legal name.

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Michigan state Rep. Brad Paquette, R-Berrien Springs, told The Midwesterner the letter, which was “paid for by The Voter Project Michigan … and authorized by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” was delivered to his grandmother’s home in Marquette, listing his mother’s maiden name.

It looks like Gretchen Whitmer leveraged the office of the Michigan Governor to send out disinformation alongside mail-in-ballot applications intended to solicit votes from inactive voter registrations like that of my mother's maiden name from the 70s. @GovWhitmer sent a letter… pic.twitter.com/p2T8XCzNPV

— Brad Paquette (@BradPaquetteMI) September 23, 2024

Paquette said his mother hadn’t lived at the address in 45 years, and has been married for 43.

“I looked at the Secretary of State website and she’s still registered there from 45 years ago,” Paquette said, adding his mother now lives in Cass County and is registered to vote there.

Paquette said his mother was visiting her mother in Marquette when she discovered the mail, and they’re now working with county officials to review any voting history associated with the old registration.

“We’ll be curious to see if there’s any activity around that,” he said. “How this is still on the books today in 2024, that’s the big question.”

Preliminary research suggests the P.O. box listed on the mailing belongs to someone who is now deceased, raising questions about the motivation behind it and association with Whitmer, Paquette said. The Voter Project Michigan does not appear to have a website. A website listed on the mailing directs readers to the Secretary of State’s absentee ballot page.

“It was prefilled, and all you had to do was sign it and date it,” Paquette said. “From my understanding, it is all just dependent on the signature to verify these things.”

“It’s just pretty alarming to see this. There’s a lot of people concerned about election security,” he said. “The leveraging of the office (of the governor) is pretty concerning to me.”

It’s also raising questions that seemingly have no clear answer.

“How did this … registration stay on the voter rolls so long?” Paquette questioned. “How do they verify this registration?”

“We have to clean up these voter rolls,” he said.

Paquette believes the dramatic language in the mailers may convince ineligible voters to return the applications and cast illegal ballots, pointing to recent polling that shows 28% of Democrats believe America would be better off if Trump was assassinated.

“It makes people pretty concerned,” he said. “Only a misdemeanor is keeping them from filling (the absentee voter application) out.”

Paquette’s mother is among countless Michiganders receiving 2024 Michigan absentee voter ballot applications from groups unaffiliated with state or local election offices, and the practice is perfectly legal if the groups meet certain requirements, WCMU reports.

Voters can fill out the applications and turn them in to local clerk’s offices, though the application sent to Paulson offers to forward a ballot to where applicants actually live.

State law requires nonprofits and partisan groups that distribute the applications to print a legal warning and instructions, and local clerks are required to match the third-party ballots with signatures on file.

“There are lots of third-party organizations and just people, going out there and doing voter registration drives and that is legal,” Isabella County Clerk Minde Lux told WCMU. “They have to meet certain qualifications and requirements, but the biggest thing is that they cannot promote nor take payment for registering people to vote.”

Lux argued the mass mailings sow distrust in the voting system,

“I personally have received five myself, so I know whoever these organizations are that are sending them out they’re not really looking into who they are sending them to,” she said. “If they were really concentrating on who they’re sending them to, I don’t think they’d be sending them to the Isabella County Clerk.”

“I am just worried about people basically feeding into these applications being real without going to the real site. I don’t like that they are sending them out, but there’s nothing that we can do to stop them,” Lux said.

The dubious mailings come three years after Whitmer vetoed Republican bills to strengthen Michigan’s voter ID requirements in 2021, alleging the effort would disproportionately impact minorities, The Detroit News reports.

“Voting restrictions that produce such a racially disparate impact must never become law in this state,” Whitmer wrote.

Democrats who gained a majority in both chambers of the state legislature in 2022 have since banned county canvassers from investigating fraud, though the law is not expected to go into effect until 2025.

In the meantime, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is fighting multiple lawsuits in court that aim to purge the state’s bloated voter rolls of dead and ineligible voters.

Benson is named in an ongoing 2021 lawsuit from the Public Interest Legal Foundation that aims to remove over 26,000 deceased residents from the state’s active voter list, and another from the Republican National Committee filed in March targeting impossibly high voter registration numbers in 53 of Michigan’s 83 counties.

While there’s no dispute that Michigan’s 8.1 million registered voters represents 105% of the state’s voting age population, Benson’s Bureau of Elections argues federal election laws prevent officials from removing inactive registrations for two election cycles without personal contact from the voter.

A PILF investigation highlighted why that’s unlikely to happen for many, documenting numerous registered voters who died decades ago.

While Benson has dismissed the lawsuits as “baseless accusations that seek to diminish people’s faith in the security of our elections,” others have exposed how some are leveraging the situation in Detroit.

Ramon Jackson found numerous former Detroit residents including himself who were registered to vote years after moving away from the Motor City, including folks he knows have never voted in their lives.

Jackson’s investigation, which started with efforts to recall a city council member, revealed former Detroit residents who were registered as permanent absentee voters without their consent or permission at addresses that included vacant homes or where they no longer lived.

“There are dozens of others who meet this pattern; fraudulently listed as registered voters and fake votes cast on behalf of these voters,” Jackson wrote in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court that was ultimately dismissed for lack of legal standing.