Caroline Bouvier Kennedy presented the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award to Jocelyn Benson, Liz Chaney, and other recipients on May 22, 2022.
by Kristine Christlieb, PIME senior correspondent | September 9, 2024
After her recent certify-the-election-or-else threats to local canvassers, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s reputation as one of the nation’s most partisan election officials keeps on growing.
Despite her partisan notoriety, this shrewd, party politician is one of the two secretaries of state the ranking Democrat Joe Morelle (NY) has chosen to testify on Wednesday before the U.S. Committee on House Administration hearing on American Confidence in Elections.
In her Madame DeFarge-style warning, when Benson told her audience -- “If someone were to violate the law and not certify the election at the local level, we will come for you.” -- no one in Michigan was surprised, but her comment did ratchet up the threat level a notch.
“We will come for you” feels a lot like “Resistance is futile.” And what if the election were to go to the opposing party, will Jocelyn Benson and team be so eager to certify?
“They want it both ways,” Patrice Johnson, chair of Michigan Fair Elections said. “They will fight like crazed badgers if the other party prevails.” She cited the pressures applied to the Wayne County Board of Canvassers after the 2020 and 2022 elections.
To naïve listeners, Benson might sound like someone who cares about the rule of law and plans to strictly enforce it. They might think, “That’s right! When people violate election law, I want the secretary of state to go after them!”
Those people would be mistaking Jocelyn Benson for someone who cares about the rule of law.
After six election lawsuit losses on election integrity issues, Benson is someone whose modus operandi is to navigate outside the law until she is sued and loses in court – all of which wastes taxpayer resources and allows for injustices to persist for the maximum amount of time as the arguments wend their way through the court system.
And yet, this is who the Democrats are putting forward on Wednesday to provide expertise on America’s confidence in elections.
This is the same woman who, in a recent interview with Steele-dossier, win-at-any cost lawyer Marc Elias, reiterated her threats and implied that people who question election results are just trying to create controversy and/or to intimidate government agencies and their officials.
What Benson wants is for canvassers to have only a “ministerial” role. In other words, canvassers would have no meaningful oversight responsibilities and would simply rubber stamp election results and send any concerns up to the state level, so the secretary of state can do the investigating. And if canvassers don’t see it Benson’s way, she’s going to come after them.
Benson is determined to keep an iron grip on Michigan elections, a position in direct opposition to Article III Statement of Ethics from the National Association of Secretaries of State’s Constitution as well as its 2020 resolution affirming the conduct of election in a nonpartisan manner.
Article III states the organization’s members commit to “placing loyalty to state and federal constitutions, the law and ethical principles above private or political gain.”
Maybe Benson feels she doesn’t really have to pay attention to those professional standards. After all, she literally wrote the book State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process (2010). So, before she was elected secretary of state in 2018, she was considered by many in the legal establishment to be an expert on the office and its role.
In an August 14, 2024, editorial for the Detroit News, former Michigan Secretary of State and current Michigan State Senator Ruth Johnson complained about Benson’s partisanship, pointing out that Benson was investigating a conservative PAC helping people register to vote but held herself to an entirely different standard, even bragging in a press release that her office was working with Rock the Vote to conduct exactly the same voter registration activities.
The Perfect Democrat Resume
It isn’t surprising Benson is a regime media darling. She is a focused and disciplined, radical progressive whose career moves and credentials are impeccable.
Like her political ancestor, Hillary Clinton, Benson is a Wellesley College, Massachusetts, graduate. While not officially “Ivy League,” Wellesley is one of the so-called Seven Sisters colleges that were once the female counterparts to the all-male Ivy League institutions.
After Wellesley, she made the obligatory trip across the pond to earn an Oxford degree, thereby solidifying her membership in the elite establishment. To put yet another star in her Establishment crown, Benson focused her sociology research on white supremacy and neo-Nazism.
With this research under her belt, she was a perfect fit for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) the controversial organization that invented the annual Hate Map. At the SPLC, she continued her work investigating white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations.
After SPLC she was admitted to Harvard Law School where she was general editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. There she worked on passage of the federal Help America Vote Act.
What brought Benson to Michigan in 2004 was a clerkship on the U.S. Court of the Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
In 2010, while she was a law professor at Wayne State University, she made her first attempt at the office of Michigan Secretary of State but was soundly defeated by Ruth Johnson.
She was then appointed dean of Wayne State’s law school in 2012 and planned her next move, a new shot at Secretary of State, which she won in 2018, with the help of George Soros backing as part of his SOS Project.
Many thought she would run for retiring Senator Debbie Stabenow’s seat this year; but she declined, leaving the door open for the Governor’s seat in 2026.
Benson’s upcoming book, The Purposeful Warrior: Standing up for What’s Right When the Stakes are High, is due for release in May 2025 and likely a critically-timed piece of her long-term political strategy. It is her version of JFK’s Profiles in Courage, which is also the name of an award the Kennedy family awarded her and Liz Cheney in 2022.
Part of the In Crowd
Benson is a veteran at testifying before Congress. Her first appearance was 16 years ago (September 2008) before the very same House Committee which will be taking her testimony on Wednesday.
According to C-SPAN archives, Benson has been called to testify before Congress six times. She has made a total of 23 appearances on C-Span, primarily testifying as an election law expert on various panels.
Because of her close association with David Becker, another election law expert, and his Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), Benson has access to all the Washington power players. In 2020 it was to CEIR that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan chose to award nearly $70 million.
According to InfluenceWatch, in 2020 CEIR distributed $12 million of those $70 million to Michigan, and other battle ground states, for “urgent voter education assistance.” Georgia, another battleground state, received $6 million.
After her Congressional appearance on Wednesday, CEIR has invited Benson to be a panelist for its program, “Confronting Threats to Election Certification: The Role of State and Local Officials.” The panel will also include birds-of-a-feather, election fraud deniers, David Becker; Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico Secretary of State (who will also be testifying on Wednesday); and Gabriel Sterling, Chief Operating Officer, Office of the Georgia Secretary of State.
Before founding CEIR, Becker created Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the system that almost managed to monopolize voter registration list maintenance nationwide. ERIC had a secondary mission to register more voters. Rep. Kevin Bratcher (R-KY) told the National Council of State Legislatures “ERIC critics are suspicious that this outreach is targeted to benefit Democrat-leaning demographics.”
Becker was in Michigan at the end of July, joining Benson in a press conference centered on early voting. Three days later, they appeared together on a PBS Firing Line episode focused on questions of election integrity.
Between receiving awards, appearing on panels and, testifying before Congress, Benson’s dance card stays full. One wonders how she has time to write a book and fulfill her role as Secretary of State.
Without question, Jocelyn Benson has more nationwide visibility than any other secretary of state, except perhaps Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger.
What to expect from the hearing
Going on the offense against Benson’s reign of terror, Michigan Fair Elections (MFE) prepared a special briefing for GOP members of the committee, detailing what Benson’s oversight has done to Michigan elections.
“We believe Benson will get some tough questions from these representatives. I don’t think she’ll be getting an award for election heroism,” said Michigan Fair Elections Chair and Founder Patrice Johnson. “She’s definitely going to be in the hot seat.”
If you have been wanting to see Benson held accountable, this hearing may be your best opportunity, Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. ET.
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