Last June, my friends at the Honest Elections Project and I took Jocelyn Benson to court and this week we held her accountable.
Our federal lawsuit sought to force the Secretary of State to comply with the National Voter Registration Act.
We presented evidence that on her watch, the state’s voter rolls were poorly maintained and badly inflated. She refused to comply with federal law, so we took her to court.
The National Voter Registration Act protects the franchise of every Michigan voter and it’s disappointing – but not surprising – that it took a federal lawsuit to force Benson to comply with election law.
She spent the last year misleading the press, twisting the data, and ignoring reality.
That all got a little tougher during the 2020 election, when she mailed unsolicited absentee voter applications to every voter on the rolls, and at least half-a-million of them came back undeliverable because the rolls were as bad (or worse) than we’d already proven they were.
A federal judge in October ordered Benson to move forward with discovery, and now, after months of active litigation, she’s publicly announced plans to comply with federal election law and to cancel 177,000 bad registrations.
She was even forced to admit on the record that she’d failed to maintain accurate rolls during the 2020 election. Her department lacked “sufficient comprehensive efforts” to maintain clean voter rolls, she said in a public statement.
Election integrity matters, and this week’s agreement means the state of Michigan will finally comply with the laws that protect it.
Sincerely,
Tony Daunt
Executive Director
Michigan Freedom Fund
P.S. Voters deserve accountability and transparency from the individuals they elect to represent them. That’s why this lawsuit was so important, and that’s why recent revelations about high ranking government officials hiding and deleting public records in Lansing is so infuriating.
Freedom Fund’s own Greg McNeilly has the latest on the growing Whitmer scandal in this week’s Detroit News. It’s an important read.
