A Man Told a Dearborn Poll Worker He Wasn’t a Citizen. She Said He Could Still Vote for Senate, Just Not President

The man at the table told the poll worker the one thing that should have ended the conversation. “I’m not a U.S. citizen,” he said. “Is that okay?”

It was okay, she told him, with one exception. Speaking in Arabic inside a Dearborn, Michigan, polling place on Tuesday, she said he just couldn’t vote for president. “Only for U.S. President you can’t vote,” she said, according to the translation published with the video, “but the others you can.”

The man was an undercover reporter for James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group. O’Keefe posted the hidden-camera video a few minutes after 8 p.m., just after Michigan’s polls closed. It drew more than 600,000 views in its first hour.

“And I can vote for Abdul, right?”

The reporter pressed her twice more. “But this election, I can vote even if I’m not a U.S. citizen?” he asked. Then he named the Democrat on top of Michigan’s ballot, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed: “And I can vote for Abdul, right?”

Both times, according to the video’s subtitles, the answer was yes.

The video does not show a ballot being handed over or cast, and it does not name the poll worker. A red equipment cart behind her is labeled “Dearborn City Clerk.”

The law is not ambiguous

Tuesday’s Michigan ballot carried races for U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 611, makes it “unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives.” The penalty is up to a year in prison.

Michigan law closes the rest of the door. The state constitution makes U.S. citizenship the first requirement for an elector “qualified to vote in any election.” There is no race on a Michigan ballot that a noncitizen may lawfully vote in, for Senate, governor or anything else.

So the line she drew, president off-limits and everything else fair game, does not exist anywhere in the law.

The same city ran out of ballots

It was already a strange night in Dearborn. At 1:20 p.m., Mayor Abdullah Hammoud posted that the city had “ALREADY surpassed total voter turnout from the 2022 General Election” with seven hours of voting left.

At 6:50 p.m., he posted again, this time in capital letters: “URGENT ELECTION UPDATE: DO NOT LEAVE THE LINE!” Some precincts, he wrote, “have temporarily run out of ballots,” and voters should “give the City Clerk’s team time to restock ballots.”

A half-hour later he declared that Dearborn had passed its entire 2024 presidential turnout “AN HOUR AGO” and was closing in on the city’s all-time record from 2020. “Dearborn showed up in a BIG way!” he wrote.

By late Tuesday night there was no public statement from Hammoud, the Dearborn City Clerk’s office or Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson about the poll worker in O’Keefe’s video, and none had said how many precincts ran short of ballots or for how long.

The messenger already has a prosecutor

O’Keefe is no stranger to Democratic prosecutors. On Oct. 28, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged him and influencer Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over hidden-camera videos they shot at Minneapolis polling places during the August primary, testing Minnesota’s “vouching” system.

Moriarty’s office says neither man signed the voter’s oath, and she told reporters neither one received a ballot or cast a vote. The Dearborn video ends with audio of those charges being announced.

His operatives did not try to vote in Dearborn either. They asked a question. The answer came back from the person whose job was to say no.