Michigan’s top elections official fought for democracy. Then Trump won

DETROIT - Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's secretary of state, had just concluded an election night news conference at Ford Field extolling the virtues of the vote when she learned that Donald Trump might be on his way to reclaiming the presidency.

She had worked relentlessly all year, and all of that long final day and night, trying to ensure that citizens in her state experienced a calm, safe and accessible election, only to see it lead to the restoration of a man and a movement that seemed the opposite of almost everything she believes in.

Although Benson is a Democrat who supported Kamala Harris in a state crucial to the vice president's chances, she was also the overseer of a nonpartisan election system. As disappointed as she might have been by the national result, her faith in democracy compelled her to accept it.

"The will of the people will stand," she said. "Whatever it is."

Nothing she had experienced during the frenetic final 72 hours before the election could have prepared her for that ending. As Benson traveled across the Detroit area - visiting polling places, checking on voting lines, passing out "I voted" stickers and chocolate chip cookies, thanking election clerks and volunteer poll watchers, rapping with DJs at the polls, joining line dances of women on the sidewalk outside an elementary school, preaching at churches about the historic meaning of the vote - it all seemed like an exercise in joy.

Benson woke up at 5 o'clock on Election Day, ripped through nine consecutive television and radio interviews until 7:30, left for a six-mile run, sent her 8-year-old son off to school in his favorite Michigan werewolf "I Voted" T-shirt, and soon enough was on the road.

At every polling place she visited - during early voting and on Election Day - Benson moved through an atmosphere that evoked steadiness and normality, equal parts fun and grinding work. She took comfort in the mundane reality of the election process as a counterpoint to years of darkness and conspiratorial thinking among those who trumpeted false fraud claims to deny Trump's 2020 defeat.

Her first Election Day stop was an appearance at the Louis Pasteur Elementary School, near her house in Detroit's Sherwood Forest neighborhood. Women were dancing on the sidewalk, and inside she noticed more citizens waiting to vote in precincts 199 and 201 than she had ever seen before. The energy thrilled her. A promising omen, she thought.

From there, Benson went on to Detroit's Northwest Activities Center, where Motown hits boomed on outdoor loudspeakers and the Rev. Steven Bland Jr. waited to greet her. Bland wore a shirt that identified him as a poll chaplain, the leader of a group of 173 peacekeeper ministers who had stationed themselves at election centers across the state to keep the atmosphere serene. "Ain't nobody going to mess with this site," he said with a broad smile.

At a chair against the wall of the polling place entrance sat Rudy Yuckov, who had driven in from the suburbs to serve as the Republican poll challenger. He expressed bitterness about where election officials had placed him, complaining that he was too far from the action to see whether voters were perpetrating fraud. He said he felt "handcuffed." He worried that someone might come in and try to vote five times at different precinct tables. He worried that the computer system might not work properly to catch irregularities.

Then, after declaring that "everything should be suspect," Yuckov acknowledged that "the registrars here are of good character and the computer system is operating without a hitch."

His comments fit a familiar pattern that Benson and other election clerks have noticed when dealing with election deniers - sinister deeds always seemed to be happening at some other polling place, not among the election officials the challengers had been observing and gotten to know.

From her seat in the middle row of a dark Chevy Tahoe taking her from stop to stop, Benson started picking up only minor signs of trouble. A few of the tabulating machines in suburban Rochester had glitches and had to be replaced, causing a temporary delay but no lost votes. Reports from downriver in Wyandotte indicated that a handful of Trump supporters were yelling at voters approaching the polling place, but they stood beyond the mandatory hundred-yard barrier and did not get physical.

Later in the day, non-credible bomb threats were called in to Michigan polling locations in four counties, part of a pattern that also affected locations in Arizona and Georgia. Federal officials said the threats, which they connected to Russia, had not prevented anyone from voting or having their ballots counted. But they were a reminder of the wide-ranging forces that Benson was up against.

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A journey into history

Benson, who turned 47 last month, ranks among a triumvirate of Democratic women leaders in the state, including Gretchen Whitmer, the governor, and Dana Nessel, the attorney general. It is no secret that she has her eyes on larger things. "Will you announce for governor Wednesday morning?" one local reporter asked her on Election Day. She is not shy about publicity. But at least for now, the nonpartisan responsibilities of her job match her passions.

In a state known for cars and politics, her domain as secretary of state encompasses both, overseeing motor vehicles and elections. But while most of the department's 1,500 employees work at the DMV, the vast majority of her time during election years - 80 percent of it this fall, she estimated - was devoted to the voting process.

She runs her office from the 14th floor of the state office building at Cadillac Place in Detroit with a mission to educate the public on the mechanics of voting, make the process as accessible as possible and illuminate its vital place in the American story. She is a preacher in the secular religion of one person, one vote, spreading the gospel to the local press, on national television, on social media, at parks and neighborhood gyms, in mayor's offices and town halls and early-voting centers. Voting, she says, is "really the only promise we have of equality in this country, the idea that on Election Day every voice counts as much as any other."

On the final Sunday before the election, she visited three traditionally African American churches to preach on the meaning of the vote. When she walked into the Living Waters Church in Redford Charter Township, the little chapel was rocking with a boisterously soulful choir backed by drums and organs as the words "I will not be silent" ran across a screen behind them.

Benson, who grew up in Pittsburgh as the daughter of two special-education teachers, was in her element, drawing on a subject that has possessed her since she ventured south from Wellesley College during a spring break in the mid-1990s to learn more about the civil rights movement and the effort to turn the promise of voting equality into a reality.

It was then, Benson told the Living Waters worshipers, that she became "instilled with this great sense of recognition and inspiration from the folks who stood at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 60 years ago" and were beaten in the march for voting rights.

"That struggle is not over," she said.

The motivation for her first trip sprang from what might seem like an unlikely source - the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in October 1995, when Benson was a freshman at Wellesley, and campus reaction was polarized based on race.

Benson and some classmates formed a group searching for common ground, and through those discussions she realized how little she knew about the civil rights movement. So she planned a trip to Alabama. While in Montgomery, she visited the offices of the Southern Poverty Law Center, where she learned about the less prominent figures in the movement, many of whom had sacrificed and lost their lives in the cause of voting rights.

She was especially moved by the story of Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit woman who had been fatally shot in late March 1965 by Klansmen while she was driving fellow civil rights activists between Selma and Montgomery.

Benson carried her memory with her throughout her drive to the election finish line, a final push that had begun the weekend before the vote on the Detroit riverfront near the Aretha Franklin Amphitheater, where a few hundred people, most of them of Mexican heritage, celebrated the Dia de los Muertos, an observance honoring ancestors.

Benson arrived in a vintage black dress she had found on Etsy with the message "vote" in white letters on front and back. Voting was another way to honor the sacrifices of those who came before us, she told the crowd. Then she went inside and placed a folded note and picture into a glass recuerdame jar. The photograph was of Liuzzo.

Standing up to threats

There was a time when the secretary of state's role seemed largely perfunctory, a dutiful bureaucracy far from the combative juice of politics. But not in the swing state of Michigan during a turbulent era when Trump and his allies foisted false claims about election fraud into the center of the political wars. Michigan, with its 15 crucial electoral college votes, stood as the middle guard in the "blue wall" between Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Benson as the state's top election office, became a favorite target of MAGA forces.

Four years ago, Trump denounced her as a "rogue secretary of state" when she sent absentee ballots to all registered voters to ease the voting process during the pandemic. One night in early December 2020, a month before violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, armed protesters gathered outside her brick colonial house and chanted "stop the steal" while she and her then-4-year-old son huddled in a back bathroom. As she waited for the police to arrive, which took an agonizing 45 minutes, she reached the conclusion that the mob was not protesting her, but rather "they were mad about the will of the voters."

The threats against her only increased this year. A Republican state senator, without delineating her alleged crimes, said she would be among the Democratic officials imprisoned when Trump won. In late October, Elon Musk, Trump's billionaire backer, posted false claims about possible voting list irregularities in Michigan and publicly identified "Jocelyn Michelle Benson" as the supposed culprit to millions of followers on X.

"It's exhausting, this constant state of anxiety and feeling threatened," she said. To help her deal with that stress, she has turned to sympathetic fellow secretaries of state, especially Cisco Aguilar of Nevada and Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania. "I know if I'm struggling, they're struggling, too," she said.

When Musk attacked her on X, she talked about it at breakfast with her family. Her husband turned the discussion into a life lesson for their son. "Your mother didn't bow to the richest man in the world," he said. "She pushed back. When he tried to attack, she stood up to him."

On election night, everything seemed upside down, and by the next morning the irony would be thick. Americans had used those hard-won voting rights - the rights Liuzzo died for, the issue Benson had devoted her career to - to help put Trump back in the White House, elevating a man who had promised to be a dictator on Day 1, who had been called "fascist to the core" by a four-star general. Michigan's staunch champion of democracy had been outdone by a man who had, in her view, never much cared for it.

The next day, news organizations called Michigan for Trump. As she tried to absorb the totality of Trump's victory and its meaning, she came to a few conclusions. Her mission would not change, only become more intense. She had already been a target of the once and future president. She was ready to be one again, if it came to that.

"Democracy has never risen or fallen based on the actions of any one leader," she said. "It's always thrived only when the American people demand that it does."