Benson takes trips to ‘sacred’ Selma
Sees fight for voting rights in new light after recent issues
For Jocelyn Benson, the lowest moment of the 2020 election she oversaw was not when protesters stood outside her Detroit home on a cold Saturday night in December chanting “stop the steal.”
It was more than two weeks earlier, when the Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers initially refused to certify the election results in the county.
That’s when Benson said she “most viscerally felt defeated.”
“I knew the dominoes that would fall if and when they didn’t certify,” she said. “And up until that point … we had protected the system against every one of the arrows that came our way.
“I just sat down in my foyer and thought, I can’t win this round,” Benson said.
One GOP member of the board suggested certifying the results everywhere in the county except for Detroit. But after hours of public comments decrying the deadlock that momentarily left the votes of hundreds of thousands hanging in the balance, the canvassers ultimately reversed their decision and certified the results.
Benson began her career in the South. “I went to Alabama because I wanted to understand the history of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of those who had been there,” she said. She said it never occurred to her then that her own voting rights would ever be in question.
But she said she feels “more of the official responsibility to protect others’ votes, as opposed to thinking about my own.” As secretary of state, Benson serves as Michigan’s chief elections officer, supervising more than 1,500 local officials who actually register voters, provide voters absentee ballots and manage polling locations.
In 2020, Benson found herself at the center of an unprecedented effort to subvert the will of voters when allies of former President Donald Trump stress-tested democracy with attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. In 2022, seeking another term as secretary of state in the battleground state, Benson has said repeatedly that the midterm election will decide the fate of American democracy.
In the upcoming Nov. 8 midterm election, Benson faces Republican Kristina Karamo, an Oak Park community college educator who
has leveled false allegations of misconduct and fraud about the 2020 election. Karamo belongs to a coalition of secretary of state candidates backed by Trump hoping to oversee elections in their states. Benson sees election deniers like Karamo as posing a fundamental threat to future elections if they win this fall.
At the Canton Democratic Club’s tenth annual pasta dinner, Benson told the room of several dozen local Democratic activists seated around banquet tables with mum centerpieces on a Friday night in late September that “the path to saving democracy and the path to dismantling it runs right through our state.”
“Yes, there’s a lot about our schools and our roads and everything else that hangs in the balance,” she said of the upcoming election. “But it’s really about whether we’re going to live in a democracy in years to come or whether we’re going to hand the keys over to people who won’t even acknowledge the truth of who won a past election.”
Over the past two years, Benson has faced no shortage of criticism over her handling of the 2020 election and Secretary of State branch offices that issue driver’s licenses and process vehicle tag renewals.
Republicans have blasted her decision to mail absentee ballot applications to every voter in Michigan in 2020 and argue ballot signature verification instructions she gave clerks that year weakened election safeguards. Outside of her election duties, Benson has tried to flex her organizational muscle to streamline services at branch offices, increasing the volume of transactions handled online and at self-service kiosks. Lawmakers from both parties have criticized Benson’s decision to do away with walkin services. While most visiting a branch office make an appointment in advance, Benson says that anyone who walks in and cannot be seen that day has a chance to return within 24 hours.
Benson credits her penchant for long-distance runs for helping her deal with the ups and downs that come with the job.
She runs every day and has finished 23 marathons, including one when she was eight months pregnant. She tries to run in the morning but if she has to stay up until midnight to complete her daily exercise, she will. Queen and Broadway musicals are staples of her running
playlist.
A lifelong focus on elections and voting rights
Benson grew up in Pittsburgh. Both her parents were special education teachers who she said instilled in her a sense to look out for those “left behind.”
She attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts where she studied political science and African American Studies. Her senior year, she landed a spot on the pages of Glamour in the magazine’s Top Ten College Women feature. Prompted to share her “dream goal,” Benson wrote: “To help ensure equal access for all citizens to education, housing and health care. I’m inspired by a Bible quote: ‘Let us love not in word … but in deed and in truth.’”
Benson began her career working for the Southern Poverty Law Center investigating hate groups. Early on, she decided to make elections her focus when she said she realized that voting is “the line that connects every other issue.”
“I’m just going to work on the foundation and let everyone else work on the other issues,” she recalled thinking at the time. “If I can contribute to just making democracy work and having everyone at the table through voting, then smart people will figure out the solutions to everything else.”
A clerkship with Judge Damon Keith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit eventually brought Benson to Detroit, where during her first week on the job she crossed paths with Rosa Parks, who lived in the same apartment building as her at the time.
In 2010, Benson’s seminal book on secretaries of state was released, described by the publisher as the “first in-depth study of the Secretary’s
role in registering voters, enforcing voting laws and regulations, overseeing elections, and certifying results.” The same year, Benson lost her first bid for secretary of state.
But she was determined to run again, reconnecting with the place that helped inspire a lifelong commitment to voting rights. She describes her annual trips to Selma as a kind of pilgrimage. “That ground is very sacred to me,” she said.
Trips to Selma help Benson reconnect with struggle for voting rights
In 1965, state troopers violently assaulted civil rights marchers in Selma led by the late Congressman John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a turning point in American history that outraged a nation and inspired the Voting Rights Act.
During one trip to Selma, a work assignment with the late Senator Carl Levin — who Benson was trying to recruit as a professor at Wayne State University’s law school where she served as dean — made her run late to the 50th anniversary program commemorating “Bloody Sunday.”
Benson pulled over on the side of the road to hear then-President Barack Obama’s speech. She said she tuned in on the road near mile marker 111 where Viola Liuzzo — the only white woman who died for the civil rights movement — was killed by Klansmen. Liuzzo had left her family in Detroit to travel to Alabama in 1965 to join those marching for voting rights led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2018, Benson won her second campaign for secretary of state, garnering nearly 53% of the vote.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump attacked her for mailing absentee ballot applications to every voter in the state. Trump and his allies’ campaign to sow doubt in the integrity of the election in Michigan featured a state legislative hearing in which the former president’s attorney Rudy Giuliani questioned witnesses who leveled unfounded allegations of fraud, and a dramatic Board of State Canvassers meeting where one Republican member overcame pressure from members of his party to clinch the certification of the election.
Benson sees foe to democracy in Karamo
Karamo worked as an election challenger in Detroit in 2020 and has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. She joined a legal effort to thwart the will of the voters, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Michigan and other battleground states. Karamo received the former president’s endorsement more than a year before the midterm election. Addressing his supporters at a Macomb County rally in April, Trump repeated baseless claims undermining the legitimacy of the 2020 election and said that if Karamo wins, she will “protect us from a corrupt election.”
Benson called the upcoming election “a choice between facts and conspiracy theories,” speaking to a roomful of Democrats in Canton.
“It’s a choice between people who will fight for our democracy and our fundamental rights and freedoms and those who will allow them to wither on the vine, or try to dismantle them themselves,” she said.
Karamo wants to be in office in 2024 and could refuse to support the certification of that year’s presidential election if she doesn’t like the outcome, Benson warned. She pointed to Georgia where in 2020, the secretary of state refused Trump’s demand to find the former president the additional votes needed to secure a victory in the state. But Karamo might entertain such a request, Benson said.
“She, just like any other election deniers seeking to be secretaries of state, may say yes, ‘I’ll find those 11,000 voters,’ as opposed to, ‘No, I won’t. Because my job is to protect the will of the people,’” Benson said.
But Benson acknowledges the limits to her role as secretary of state. When Wayne County voters in 2020 showed up to the canvassing meeting to demand their votes count, Benson said it was an important reminder that she cannot singlehandedly preserve democracy in Michigan.
“It was such a memorable moment for me to just be like, I’ve gotten this as far as I can take it and then the people showed up, and it was a beautiful thing,” she said. “And it was also a really visceral lesson for me that at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to save democracy.”
Clara Hendrickson fact-checks Michigan issues and politics as a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support her work at bit.ly/freepRFA. Contact her at chendrickson@freepress.com or 313-296-5743. Follow her on Twitter @clarajanehen.