One registered voter in the city of Detroit was born almost 200 years ago, according to a lawsuit. This still-active voter would have been born 14 years before Michigan became a state.

Sound fishy to you? That's not all. This ancient voter appears to be one of thousands falsely registered in Detroit, many of whom died a decade ago or more yet were still able to drag themselves from their graves to vote in the most important election of our lifetimes (though, I guess, not their lifetimes).

This week, the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit against Detroit election officials, claiming numerous such instances of demonstrable voter fraud. After combing through voter records for two years, the public-interest law firm released some pretty astonishing findings.

During the 2016 election, Detroit had 511,786 registered voters despite having only 479,267 voting-age residents, according to the lawsuit. That's more than 32,500 people who should have been booted off the list. Some of the names belonged to people who were 105 years old or older, and the foundation flagged 4,788 registration files as potential duplicates or triplicates.

Among more than 2,500 registered voters who were found to be likely dead, “(65) percent, or 1,629 registrants, have been deceased for more than 10 years. Of those, 898 registrants have been deceased for more than 15 years, 324 registrants have been deceased for more than 20 years, and 13 have been deceased for more than 25 years,” the suit said.

This spells trouble, not just for Detroit's past, but for its near future.

“The City of Detroit is failing to perform some of the most basic functions owed to its citizenry,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “The city government’s nonchalant attitude toward addressing evidence of dead and duplicate registrations exposes yet another vulnerability in our voting systems as our nation works to improve election security before November 2020.”

So, are these thousands of fake voters actually influencing elections? Logan Churchwell, communications and research director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said all of the apparently fraudulent registers brought up in the lawsuit are active, meaning their addresses are still good and, worst of all, they've voted at least often enough within the past few years not to be flagged as dormant.

Christy Jenson, the Michigan Democratic Party executive director, has argued that the lawsuit doesn't claim any voter fraud and is meant to "make voters have less confidence in what is happening in their communities."

Churchwell, however, said the point of the suit isn't to upend the results of any elections.

"Our argument is the city of Detroit is creating an environment where voter fraud can occur and go undetected," Churchwell said over the phone.

The real concern is why no one working for the city of Detroit apparently thought to flag, for instance, that one voter was listed as having been born in 1823. This voter, Churchwell explains, has been registered since 2008.

"That’s quite a span of time," Churchwell said. "There’s still no system to catch these mistakes."

If Detroit doesn't clean up its act by next fall, it might just have thousands of fake voters swarming the polls, probably to support Democratic candidates. That might sound like a problem, but it's not one that Detroit officials seem too eager to fix.