Jocelyn Benson: Power without accountability.

Noncitizens voted in Michigan elections. That is an established fact. In January 2026, a Dominican Republic citizen pleaded guilty in federal court to voting in Michigan’s 2018 and 2020 elections. The Department of State’s own review identified 15 people who appeared to be noncitizens and cast ballots in the 2024 general election. On August 13, 2026, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in that election and one citizen accused of registering a noncitizen spouse. Those are the cases investigators found after the ballots were cast.

The known cases establish a floor, not a ceiling. The state’s review was a targeted comparison of motor-vehicle and voter-file records; it cannot establish how many ineligible voters were never flagged by those datasets. Once an illegal ballot enters a tabulator, officials cannot retrieve and subtract that voter’s choices. Michigan voters therefore know that noncitizen votes were counted. The public record does not establish how many additional cases escaped detection.

Reconstructing what happened is made harder by Benson-era record-destruction directives. Federal law requires election officers to preserve for 22 months all records and papers relating to registration and acts requisite to voting in federal elections. Yet Benson’s Bureau of Elections instructed clerks to delete electronic poll-book software and associated files within seven days of certification, subject to limited exceptions. A 2025 Michigan House impeachment resolution states that the deletion order arguably violated federal and state retention laws because the native electronic records were not preserved. Paper printouts cannot reproduce every log, timestamp, and piece of metadata contained in the deleted files. Destroying that evidence makes a complete investigation harder—and makes official claims about the unknown universe impossible to verify independently.

Muskegon election officials intercepted batches of suspicious 2020 voter-registration applications submitted by workers connected to GBI Strategies. Federal records released in 2026 show investigators could not match 91 of 107 sampled applicants to the information provided. Additional reporting says packages tied to the operation were shipped to addresses in 68 Michigan cities. The state-level system did not stop the forms before they reached local election offices. A local clerk did.

Michigan’s auditor general separately identified Qualified Voter File weaknesses involving reconciliation, address and death records, electronic poll books, audit reporting, and training. These were not theoretical vulnerabilities. Bad data traveled far enough to require detection by a clerk, an auditor, or a later corrective process. A statewide system that depends on rescue after entry is not a system operating under control.

Courts blocked Benson’s 2020 polling-place firearm directive for bypassing required rulemaking, invalidated her 2021 signature-matching instructions on the same procedural ground, struck an unconstitutional “initial presumption” favoring absentee signatures in 2024, narrowed portions of her election-challenger guidance, and held in 2025 that ballot-stub instructions conflicted with amended state law.

The recurring lesson is unmistakable: Benson repeatedly advanced consequential election policy through departmental instructions instead of lawful rulemaking or legislation, and litigants repeatedly had to force Michigan’s chief election officer back inside statutory limits.

Benson is simultaneously Michigan’s chief election officer and the Democratic nominee for governor. Her May 2026 “election firewall” memorandum delegates selected matters involving her candidacy to the Bureau of Elections director. The policy was drafted under Benson’s authority. It is not a statute, an independent monitor, or a recusal imposed by anyone outside her department.

The candidate who heads the department administering her election decided which decisions she would surrender, to whom, and on what terms. She retained the institutional authority while defining the limits of her own withdrawal. That is not outside oversight. It is self-policing on official letterhead.