Benson, Jocelyn SoS
The Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft: Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is “not really for free or fair elections, she's trying to rig them”
10/23/24 MMA
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michigan’s top elections official defended the state’s elections after repeated attacks on X from Elon Musk, who spread false claims about inactive voters.
Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, corrected Musk multiple times in recent days and called his comments on voter list maintenance “dangerous disinformation”.
Musk first reposted a video about inactive voters who remain on Michigan’s rolls, saying: “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!?”
Musk has a penchant for sharing false, misleading or incomplete information about elections and voting processes. Elections officials have reached out to him to attempt to correct the misinformation on multiple occasions, which has not quelled his tweets on the topic. He has emerged as a major spreader of rightwing conspiracies about voting in advance of the November election, and he is spending many millions of his dollars to help elect Donald Trump.
[
Pennsylvania governor says law enforcement should investigate Elon Musk’s $1m voter ploy
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/21/election-shapiro-musk-1-million-giveaway)
Benson responded to Musk this week, noting that there were not more voters than citizens in Michigan – the state has 7.9 million people of voting age and 7.2 million active registered voters. Musk was “pushing a misleading number that includes 1.2m inactive records slated for removal in accordance with the law”, she said.
She pointed people to a state government website with election facts, which explains how inactive voters must remain on the rolls according to state and federal law until a waiting period of two federal elections has passed, which could be up to four years. More than 600,000 voters are “slated for cancellation” in 2025 and 2027 because of inactivity, the site notes.
Musk wasn’t deterred. He pulled out her middle name, saying: “Jocelyn Michelle Benson, shame on you for blatantly lying to the public! You only plan to remove the ineligible voters AFTER this election. That necessarily means that there are far more people registered to vote than there eligible voters.”
Benson again responded to Musk, sharing the election facts website and saying: “In Michigan we tell the truth and we follow the law. I suggest you do the same.”
On CNN, Benson said Musk’s comments were “very concerning” because of the size of his platform, and that she wished people with large platforms would use them to spread accurate election information instead.
“If you have enough time to Google me and look up my middle name, which he clearly did, you should be able to find out the facts of our elections and post those as well,” she said.
The Republican National Committee has sued Michigan over its voter rolls, part of a swath of lawsuits the group has filed across the country that seek to limit voting access and set the stage for false claims of voter fraud. Some states have sought to purge their voter rolls this year, alleging that inflated rolls with inactive or otherwise ineligible voters could lead to fraud, but these purges can boot eligible voters from the rolls.
Voter list maintenance is done regularly by elections officials, who compare voter data to other sources to remove people who have died, moved or otherwise lost their ability to vote. But elections officials must carefully balance list accuracy and removing voters – mistakes can deprive eligible voters of their right to vote.
ink anand 9 24
Four years ago, protesters gathered outside the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, calling for her to reject the results of the 2020 election. Last month, she was the target of two “swatting” attacks, in which someone calls in a false report of a hostage situation or other crisis to provoke an armed police response. Benson has made it clear that these attacks on her as the overseer of state elections are attacks on the freedom of millions of Michigan voters.
Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, the mechanisms of American elections are remarkably robust, even under the unprecedented pressure they’ve been subjected to over the last decade. Unfortunately, claims of fraud, stoked by bad-faith actors, are believed by a significant portion of Americans. It is one aspect of the very serious threat to democracy posed by the MAGA movement.
The electoral stakes are even higher this year, and voters and officials face new threats from coordinated disinformation campaigns and A.I. deepfakes further poisoning an information environment that’s more fragmented than ever by the division between weakened news organizations and the ever more important ecosystem of social media, influencers, and content creators. So we reached out to Benson to talk about how she and her colleagues across the country are preparing for the existing and novel threats they expect to face over the next two months.
She told us about how much the continuing attacks on the system have changed the job of administering elections over the past few cycles, what sort of support state election officials need from the federal government, her take on how effective the Harris campaign has been in communicating to swing-state constituents, and what voters need to know to do their part in preserving the democratic process. Most surprisingly to us, she suggested that the locus of electoral sabotage has evolved in recent years, and that the rest of us need to catch up to where the problem is.
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You've obviously been on the front lines of this question of election integrity in Michigan, and around the country, and people have not just argued with you about it, but come after you personally for it for some time now. I understand that last month, their rage literally landed on your doorstep. Can you tell me what happened last month and what it tells you about where your state and the country are right now?
Yeah. I think the path to the presidency runs through our state, runs through Michigan, and because of that, we are very much in the eye of the storm. And recognizing that reality, the attacks, the misinformation, the vitriol, the threats, it really escalated in the last several months. Among other things, it meant twice within a 48-hour period, my home was swatted in the middle of the night, once in the middle of Saturday, and then again early on a Monday morning.
What did that actually mean, practically, for you? What happens?
Well, it means in the dark of night, when police get a call that something particularly violent is occurring in the home, that police show up without their lights, walk up to the home, and intend to potentially forcefully enter it if no one answers or just various different procedures. And it just creates a potentially volatile and even violent, maybe even deadly, situation for a family who is simply just inside resting. And we know that a number of candidates have been impacted by this in our state, a number of election officials as well, have been impacted by this across the country. So it's unnerving in its volatility and in the uncertainty it creates.
But I was grateful that my husband, who was in the military, knew what to do. He called the local police as soon as he saw, through our security cameras, people approaching our home, and we live just half a mile away from the local police station. So they were able to affirm that there was a call that was made and they were showing up in response to that call. And then they radioed the police outside our home, from their local station, to say everything was fine inside. And then the police stood down, and my husband went outside and talked to them...$
an 6 22
After now-President Joe Biden won Michigan in 2020’s presidential election, Christian nationalist and anti-vaxxer Kristina Karamo was among the far-right conspiracy theorists who falsely claimed that then-President Donald Trump was the real winner in that midwestern state. Now, Karamo is the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, and she is hop9 24ing to unseat Jocelyn Benson — the Democratwho currently holds that position — in the 2022 midterms.
Trump and his MAGA allies were unsuccessful in their efforts to steal Michigan’s electoral votes from Biden in 2020, and Benson deserves some of the credit. As Michigan secretary of state, Benson forcefully pushed back against the Big Lie. But if Karamo defeats Benson, journalist Elaine Godfrey warns in an article published by The Atlantic on May 22, elections in Michigan will be run by a relentless Big Lie promoter.
“Barring any changes at an upcoming convention in August, and with Republicans poised to have a strong midterm election year, Karamo has a shot at victory in November,” Godfrey explains. “Michigan’s next election chief, in other words, might be one of its foremost election-conspiracy theorists. And what happens in this swing state in 2024 could tip the entire presidential outcome.”
Trump has endorsed the 36-year-old Karamo as well as Matt DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general — a position presently held by Democrat Dana Nessel, an ally of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (who is running for reelection).
“Despite never having held elected office, Karamo already has proved to be an enthusiastic brawler in the GOP’s culture war,” Godfrey observes. “On her theology-and-politics podcast, which she appears to have launched in 2020, Karamo has endorsed the conspiracy theory that left-wing anarchists were behind the January 6 attack on the Capitol. She has warned listeners about ‘conservative imposters’ within the Republican Party, declared herself an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ and called public schools ‘government indoctrination camps,” according to a CNN review. “More integral to Trump’s goals, though, is that Karamo has never backed down from her allegations of fraud, despite the State Senate investigation and multiple state-run election audits. She’s said that Trump, not Biden, is the real winner of Michigan — and the election.”
Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, is a conservative who is highly critical of the GOP’s Trumpified direction in his state — and he views Karamo as dangerous. Timmer has no doubt that Karamo, as Michigan secretary of state, would try to help Trump steal the 2024 election if he were the Republican nominee.
Timmer told The Atlantic, “Without question.… she’ll use her office,” Timmer said. “They want to throw a wrench in the process, create chaos, and muscle through the results they want.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/big-lie-promoting-republicans-are-moving-closer-to-seizing-control-over-elections-report/
The voter suppression bills passed by GOP-controlled state legislatures all over the U.S. are being slammed by Democrats for making voting more difficult by reducing or eliminating early voting or discouraging the use of mail-in ballots. But as bad as those things are, something much more sinister and nakedly authoritarian is coming from MAGA Republicans in 2022: an effort to take control of the administration of elections, making it easier for them to simply throw out election results if they don’t like the outcome. And if the results of the 2022 midterms put enough “Stop the Steal” Republicans in control of elections, they may have a chance to do exactly that in 2024.
In an article published by the New York Times on June 15, reporters Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti take a look at MAGA efforts to gain control of election systems in key swing states such as Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona.Their article was published the morning after Jim Marchant, a far-right Big Lie promoter who falsely claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, won the GOP nomination for Nevada secretary of state.
“The potential for far-right Republicans to reshape the election systems of major battleground states is growing much closer to reality,” Epstein and Corasaniti warn. “As the halfway point nears of a midterm year that is vastly friendlier to Republicans, the party’s voters have nominated dozens of candidates for offices with power over the administration and certification of elections who have spread falsehoods about the 2020 presidential contest and sowed distrust in American democracy. The only way to restore trust, these candidates say, is by electing them.”
The reporters continue, “In Michigan, Pennsylvania and now Nevada, Republican voters have elevated candidates who owe their political rise to their amplification of doubts about Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s victory, and who are now vying in elections for governor, secretary of state and attorney general — offices that will hold significant sway over the administration of the 2024 presidential election in critical swing states.”
In Pennsylvania, a key swing state that now-President Joe Biden won by only 2 percent in 2020, the Republican gubernatorial nominee is Doug Mastriano — a conspiracy theorist and Christian nationalist who is so extreme that he is even to the right of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. And in Michigan, the far-right GOP nominee for secretary of state is Kristina Karamo. Mastriano and Karamo both falsely claim that Trump won their states in 2020 despite the fact that recounts confirmed Biden’s victory.
“The rise of election deniers is far from over,” Epstein and Corasaniti note. “Primary contests coming later this month in Colorado and in early August in Arizona and Wisconsin will provide more clarity on the depth of Republican voters’ desire to rally behind candidates devoted to the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump.”
The events that followed the 2020 presidential election were unprecedented in U.S. history. Never before in U.S. history had an incumbent president lost an election only to falsely claim that he didn’t, then do everything he could to get the election results overturned. Never before in U.S. history had the supporters of a defeated president violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building in order to keep him in the White House and threatened to lynch the vice president for not going along with them.
Ben Berwick, counsel for the nonpartisan Protect Democracy, told the Times, “We are in a dangerous place at the moment. There is a substantial faction in this country that has come to the point where they have rejected the premise that when we have elections, the losers of the elections acknowledge the right of the winner to govern.”
Campaigning on the Big Lie isn’t necessarily a recipe for victory in a GOP primary. In Georgia’s 2022 gubernatorial primary, incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp — who acknowledges that Biden won his state fair and square in 2020 — defeated former Sen. David Perdue, a Trump-endorsed Big Lie promoter, by a brutal 52 percent. Perdue campaigned on the Big Lie, and he suffered a humiliating defeat.
But other Big Lie promoters, including Marchant and Mastriano, have won primaries.
“The number of election deniers who have won Republican nominations is quickly rising in congressional and state legislative races across the country,” Epstein and Corasaniti observe. “At least 72 members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election have advanced to the general election, according to a New York Times analysis. And in Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas — four competitive states that have already held primaries — 157 state legislators who took concrete steps to overturn or undermine the 2020 election will be on the ballot in November.”
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, is running for reelection and is up against Audrey Trujillo, a MAGA Republican and Big Lie promoter. Trujillo won her party’s nomination on June 7.
Oliver told the Times, “We’re going to see at least one, if not more, election deniers rise to these offices in 2022. And I think we need to be scared and concerned about every single one of them.”