- Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is running for governor on her administrative acumen and voting rights advocacy
- Benson says short SOS office visits and expanded voting options show what she could do as governor
- Critics argue she’s politicized the office in ways that benefit her political party
In her eight years as Michigan’s secretary of state, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson has presided over one of the most tumultuous elections in Michigan’s history, implemented voting changes and reformed the way her department does business.
Benson depicts herself as both an efficiency-minded bureaucrat — “I run the DMV, so I’m very popular,” she jokes dryly at campaign events — and a guardian of democracy.
“I am a data-driven person so I measure my record based on one question: did we save Michiganders time, money and protect their right to vote?” Benson said in a statement to Bridge Michigan. “At the Department of State, the answer is yes.”
But Republican rival John James argues Benson has made “disqualifying” mistakes, and critics contend she’s politicized her office and bent rules in favor of Democrats.
“Jocelyn Benson has been the most partisan secretary of state in my lifetime,” said state Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican who was Benson’s direct predecessor as secretary of state.
“She has flaunted the law and placed her thumb on the scale in ways my predecessors and I would never have dreamed of doing,” Johnson told Bridge.
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Critics have pointed to razor-thin decisions on ballot proposals as further evidence that Benson targets conservatives and claimed she would influence the coming election even as she formalized a firewall policy that largely blocks her from the process.
Benson was elected during 2018’s Democratic wave, promising that key government interactions — casting a ballot, registering to vote and renewing a driver’s license — would happen in 30 minutes or less under her leadership.
She has lowered wait times and overseen an expansion of voting options, but also found herself at the center of more legal disputes over Michigan elections than any official in modern times. While she’s often championed government transparency, her own office struggled to launch a key portal for the public to view ethics disclosures.
Her office also has rolled out the popular new retro license plates.
So has Benson kept her promises, and how has she done as the state’s chief elections officer? Here’s what to know ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Elections
Benson has overseen three statewide elections, including the 2020 contest that President Donald Trump contested but she called the “most secure, fair and accessible election in Michigan history.”
Two voter-approved constitutional amendments in 2018 and 2022 made her responsible for implementing a litany of reforms alongside local election officials, such as automatic voter registration and early in-person voting.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Benson was one of 11 secretaries of state nationwide to send absentee ballot applications to every voter in the state. The move ignited a firestorm of controversy as Trump claimed the election would be “stolen” and that mail-in voting was rife with fraud. A lawsuit over the decision was dismissed in state court.
After Trump sought and failed to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Benson said armed protesters gathered outside her Detroit home — an anecdote she brings up regularly as evidence of her commitment to the job.
In the years following, Republicans have frequently sued Benson and the Department of State. Skepticism over the legitimacy of Michigan’s elections has endured despite a GOP-led investigation that found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“I don’t think there’s been a more challenging period of time for chief state election officials in the United States than in the last 10 years, and she served during eight of those 10 years,” said David Becker, an election law advocate who has known Benson for decades, considers her a friend and worked on an election security task force she formed.
While Benson won many election-related lawsuits against her department in federal court, state judges have rebuffed her attempts to promulgate voting rules.
Those include attempts to create restrictions on poll challengers, though previous poll-challenger rules had been upheld, due to procedural issues. State courts also twice blocked her efforts to ensure voter signatures are presumed accurate. In 2020, her office unsuccessfully attempted to ban guns from polling places — though that policy was later written into law by Democrats.
Elections and security
In her 2018 campaign, Benson said she wanted to “make Michigan a national model in election security” — something Republicans have spent years attacking her department about.
Benson said she wanted tougher penalties for voter fraud and election intimidation, and would “lead an effort to protect our elections from the threat of computer hacking, tampering, and manipulation.” Democrats in 2023 passed a law increasing penalties for intimidating election workers, but not intimidating voters. Existing laws prohibiting voter fraud have been essentially unchanged — though a law passed under Democrats now requires election officials to report instances of double voting.
Benson first fulfilled one aspect of that pledge by creating an Election Security Advisory Commission in March 2019. The panel published recommendations in October 2020, including more use of risk-limiting audits, where state officials review a statistical sample of ballots after an election to ensure the results were accurate.
Those audits expanded under Benson’s watch, with the department going from a few localized pilots to regular statewide examination of ballots.
Benson’s department has repeatedly tussled with Republicans over the Qualified Voter File, in part because the statewide database had contained more registered voters than the state’s voting-age population.
That is no longer the case.
Benson was sued repeatedly by the Republican Party over the bloated state of those voter rolls, only for both cases to be tossed out — as was another suit attempting to disqualify some overseas voters in 2024. In 2025, her department was sued by the Trump administration for refusing to grant federal officials access to unredacted voter rolls but again prevailed in court.
Benson’s department is moving to purge voter rolls more aggressively. A June 2020 lawsuit — brought by a Republican who now sits on the Board of State Canvassers — was voluntarily dismissed. This year, the department approved a new rule that allows them to cancel registrations of people who haven’t voted in at least 20 years.
A recent report from Michigan’s nonpartisan auditor general found that Benson’s department generally does a good job making sure only eligible people are registered to vote. But it also identified a small number of possible noncitizens, dead voters and voters with inaccurate or ineligible birthdates.
Finding efficiencies
In her campaign for governor, Benson has leaned on her bureaucratic record as evidence of her acumen, including a new appointment-based system that has generally sped up office visits.
“That we can actually take what is the poster child of government inefficiency, the DMV, and reform it and make it work well, gives me optimism and hope that we can do the same in every aspect of government,” Benson told Bridge Michigan.
Those reforms formed the top promise in Benson’s 2018 campaign: a “30-minute guarantee” that “no one, no matter where they live, should have to wait more than 30 minutes to renew their driver’s license, register their vehicle or cast a ballot.”
If offices are faster today, it’s in part because Benson has succeeded in moving business out of them. In the fiscal year before Benson was elected, 72% of all customer transactions happened in Secretary of State branches, 12.4 million in total. In the 2023-24 fiscal year, 45% of all transactions happened in-office, 7.1 million total.
After wait times got worse during Benson’s first year in office, the pandemic spurred a sea change. Following a two-month closure, offices reopened in June 2020 by appointment only but were quickly booked out for months. Lawmakers were forced to grant amnesty to drivers with expired papers.
Benson sought to make the appointment-only model permanent, but amid bipartisan pressure to resume walk-ins, eventually supported a hybrid system that features appointments but allows spontaneous visits.
Benson also added self-service kiosks throughout Michigan that are funded by fees of $4.25 per transaction, as well as “mobile offices,” vans that offer services in remote areas like Mackinac Island.
Benson’s office says it has effectively achieved her promised “30-minute guarantee” for customers who plan ahead and make an appointment.
In a July 2025 presentation, the department’s chief operating officer said “90% of customers are served within 20 minutes of their scheduled visit.” But her office did not provide information on how long it took for walk-in customers, who account for more than a third of all visitors, according to a recent audit.
That 2025 report from the Office of Auditor General found that in April 2024, 87% of walk-ins to branch offices could get a same-day appointment. But the audit also dinged the department because it “did not consistently record wait time data for customers who did not have a scheduled visit.”
Transparency troubles
Benson has urged lawmakers to expand Michigan’s transparency laws, particularly in campaign finance, lobbying and personal financial disclosure.
But the Department of State’s efforts to improve access to public disclosures has proven fraught. An overhaul of the online portals for those filings, called the Michigan Transparency Network, had a bug-riddled rollout and provided less information to the public than the prior, decades-old system.
“Not having access to campaign finance tools … makes it easier to hide corruption,” Neil Thanedar, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a money-in-politics watchdog, told Bridge Michigan in a prior interview.
Benson and state officials have defended the system and blame most issues on the government contractor paid millions to develop it.
“To do big transformational things in this state, you have to be willing to recognize that things won’t always go perfectly, especially on day one,” Benson previously told Bridge.
She has pointed to her willingness to post the results of every Freedom of Information Act request online, though it doesn’t appear all have made it to the website. The site shows just six FOIA requests that were fulfilled this year.
Other Issues and Initiatives
Running for office in 2018, Benson pledged to “ban fee increases,” but in 2020, her office supported legislators’ successful efforts to increase the cost of license plate transfers to $15 from $8.
In 2025, Benson did not publicly oppose a road funding deal that increased annual registration fees for light-duty EVs and plug-in hybrids.
In response, her campaign argued “the two fee increases that occurred were both at the request of the Legislature and carried out by them.”
Benson’s department also faces litigation alleging racial discrimination under her watch. In January, three current and one former employee filed suit in Wayne County alleging policies and procedures are unequally applied to Black employees and not enforced for white employees. The department has denied the allegations.
Asked about her record in office, Benson’s campaign also touted the Road to Restoration program, a partnership with the Department of Attorney General and private nonprofits that helps Michiganders who had prior convictions expunged under 2021’s Clean Slate law get their licenses restored.
Finally, Benson’s office also rode the nostalgia wave in 2021 by reintroducing a series of classic Michigan license plates, and the alternative color schemes, which drivers can obtain at an extra cost.
They are so widely popular they now appear on more than a quarter of all vehicles.
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