Jocelyn Benson isn’t taking election integrity seriously, and voters are noticing.

This column originally appeared in The Detroit News.

Michigan has an election integrity problem. Without an urgent address from the secretary of state, it may boil over into an election integrity crisis. Worse, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and some prominent election officials appear to be intentionally undermining solutions.

Chronic election integrity debacles in places like Detroit, Flint and Southfield have Michigan voters questioning the outcome of an election that’s still six-and-a-half weeks away. Instead of fixing problems, Benson’s typical response has been to tell voters they should expect problems and delays on election night.

Shocking new allegations have emerged out of the TCF Center in Detroit, where the scandal-plagued City Clerk and her elections team count absentee votes each election night.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is headed back to court, after the Honest Elections Project reviewed voter rolls across the state of Michigan and found some shocking numbers.

Major Fraud Risk: Jocelyn Benson Floods State with Absentee Voter Applications for Tens-of-Thousands of Dead, Non-Existent Voters

 Federal Lawsuit Flagged 33,000 Dead, Duplicate, or Non-existent Registered Voters in Detroit Alone – and Benson Just Sent an Absentee Voter Application to Each Of Them

Jocelyn Benson literally wrote the book about being a Secretary of State. In that book, she claims that one of the most important – most critical – roles for an election official is to maintain clean voter files, including the removal of voters who are dead, no longer living in the state, or otherwise ineligible.

This column originally appeared in the Detroit News.

Jocelyn Benson literally wrote the book on being a secretary of state. Just ask her.

She’s doing more than write about the position now, but new records emerging as part of a lawsuit in the city of Detroit challenge Benson’s seriousness as a constitutional officer. They also leave Benson facing a pair of startling questions: does she actually believe what she wrote, and if so, why isn’t she practicing what she preached?

This column originally appeared in the Detroit News.

“Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. I feel it in the air, the summer's out of reach.” – Don Henley

August will soon be in our rearview mirror, and along with it the first summer on the job for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Like Henley in his 1984 classic, Michiganians may have a little voice inside their heads screaming don’t look back.  

Whitmer reversed course on campaign pledges and wasted summer months on a dilettante roadshow promoting a tax hike that was dead on arrival when there was still snow on the ground.

Bad enough that Jocelyn Benson failed her own “transparency” test, making headlines for attaching expensive price tags to FOIA requests. Her department has consistently refused to answer FOIA requests in a timely or complete manner. (The department estimated one of our requests would be completed in 2-3 weeks… and that has now grown to 2-3 months. We’re still waiting!)