Tough week for Benson gives opponents plenty of ammo

The good news for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is that she’s the undisputed front-runner to win next year’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and she’s in a competitive race with presumed Republican front-runner John James to be elected Michigan’s next governor in November 2026. 

The bad news is that this past week revealed numerous cracks in the armor. 

Due to her questionable decisions, Benson has received criticism on several fronts, not necessarily for overtly political reasons. 

First, Benson held her first press conference as a gubernatorial candidate in the lobby of the Richard Austin Building, which is typically off-limits for political activity. 

She argued that the lobby was accessible to anyone who wanted to hold a political press conference, so she was in the clear ... or so she thought. 

The Attorney General’s Office stated that the move violated the Michigan Campaign Finance Act, the exact law Benson, an attorney by trade, is responsible for administering. 

It didn’t matter that it was 10 degrees in Lansing on Jan. 22. If Benson wanted to talk to the press about her political run in warmer quarters, she should have met up somewhere else. 

The AG’s office couldn’t discipline her, though, because it doesn’t have the authority ... unless Benson, herself, sought disciplinary action against herself.  

That wasn’t going to happen. 

If that wasn’t enough, the state House voted to hold Benson in contempt on an entirely different matter.  

After the last election, Rep. Rachelle Smit, a former Allegan County township clerk, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the training documents the secretary of state gives to local clerks. 

Smit was looking for what type of instruction the Bureau of Elections provides to local clerks and how far afield Benson’s office may go in telling election workers what they should be doing. 

Benson, by and large, ignored large parts of the FOIA until Republicans took the majority in January, when Smit was named the House Elections Integrity chair. From that point, Smit and the House Oversight Committee played hardball with the request. 

They approved a subpoena requesting the document, but Benson’s office essentially declined. Their concern was that some of the information could be used for nefarious purposes by individuals I’ll call “election deniers,” who might attempt to break into machines with source codes. 

A former state representative and attorney general candidate are currently facing criminal charges for seizing an election counting machine, taking it to a hotel room, breaking into it and seeing if it was messing with the results at all. 

The courts will ultimately determine who is right on this issue, but for now, Republicans will have an easy time portraying Benson as a secretive state bureaucrat who refuses to disclose how she instructs clerks to administer elections. 

Then, there’s this whole debacle about the campaign finance disclosure page. Benson’s team claims they needed to update it to activate a new feature that is allegedly designed to reveal the financial assets of state-level officeholders and those seeking those positions. 

The extent to which that feature is actually working and who is at fault for that is for another time and place. 

For now, it’s pretty clear that the company hired to update the site underestimated the work involved and has made vast quantities of data that the public took for granted completely inaccessible. 

Benson’s office has ceased payment to Tyler Technologies until they figure out how to make simple information about who is lobbying in Michigan and who is spending money in elections, etc., accessible again. 

In the meantime, there are concerns about the level of information available to the public if and when the system is back up and running.  

Benson has already taken away the ability for reporters to conduct criminal background checks on candidates. Candidate phone numbers and home addresses have also disappeared for now, too. 

For now, very little of this has penetrated the public’s information stream.  

Give it a year, though, and we’ll hear a lot more. 

(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. His email address is melinnky@gmail.com.)