One day after being sued over a controversial ballot box citizenship question, Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said Tuesday there are an estimated 4,000 non-citizens on Michigan's voter rolls.

The estimate is based on the state's access to citizenship information for one-fifth of the population, Johnson said, adding the federal government won't give her access to more citizenship data.

Johnson said the results of a "very tedious" analysis of 58,000 driver's licenses and state-issued identification cards found 963 non-citizens registered to vote.

Department of State employees cross-referenced those non-citizens with voting records and found 54 have a voting history and have voted a total of 95 times, Johnson said.

Using census estimates that 305,000 non-citizens live in Michigan, Johnson's office extrapolated that 5,064 could be non-citizens and then lowered its estimate to 4,000 to account for children, spokeswoman Gisgie Gendreau said.

Johnson said the discovery justifies her insistence that Michigan's 7.34 million registered voters be asked to affirm their citizenship if they vote at the polls in November. The daughter of a Canadian immigrant, Johnson said the citizenship question is necessary because over the years non-citizens have been automatically registered to vote while legally obtaining a driver's license.

"We have a problem. We need to fix it," Johnson told The Detroit News. "Denying and minimizing it doesn't get the job done."

A group of voting rights advocates, labor unions and citizens sued Johnson in federal court Monday, challenging her authority to ask voters to affirm their citizenship after Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed legislation adding the question to absentee and in-person voting applications.

The plaintiffs say the question is redundant because voters affirm their citizenship when they register to vote and say the question is an ineffective way to root out potential voter fraud...

Johnson, a Republican, also implied President Obama and Democrat county and city clerks are obstructing her efforts to root out non-citizen voters. She specifically noted her office found 80 non-citizens registered to vote in Macomb County, where County Clerk Carmella Sabaugh, a Democrat, has said she won't let the citizenship question appear on applications to vote.

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