Michigan’s top election official seems to have a habit of treating transparency like an optional feature, not a job requirement. More recently, Benson’s office demanded thousands of dollars from Republican lawmakers who want access to election training materials, this after dragging their feet on a records request for months.

MDOS called out for not fulfilling simple records request.

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State representative and Speaker Pro Tem Rachelle Smit (R-Martin) took Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to the woodshed two weeks ago during testimony in front of the state’s new House Oversight Committee, calling out MDOS (Michigan Department of State) for turning transparency into an Olympic-level game of hide-and-seek. After four months of chasing down basic election training documents, Smit slammed Benson’s office for throwing up roadblocks at every turn.

Smit said in an op-ed with the Detroit News, “This request is for the sort of packets and documents they give to new clerks who just got elected – the basic training materials clerks use to fully become acquainted with election laws and processes… These items should already have been posted on the public website for the Secretary of State; they should not require a special request.”

Smit’s patience wore thin as her simple request for login credentials to the Bureau of Elections e- learning portal was met with bureaucratic stalling. Even after resorting to a FOIA request, MDOS still didn’t produce anything except an estimate of the charges – nearly $9,000 for a task they said would take an incredible 140 hours to complete.

Smit accused Benson’s office of deliberately dragging its feet to dodge scrutiny over election management in addition to inflating the price of the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) saying, “There is no scenario in which the documents I requested could take 140 man-hours to generate. I am willing to believe that Secretary Benson’s office is slow, even painfully slow, but 140 man-hours is a ridiculous amount of time to gather documents that would take any competent person, at most, 2 or 3 hours.”

Just four hours for some docs.

Benson’s office finally released some of the requested information to Smit but not all of it – and it was only after pressure from the House Oversight Committee. How long did it take? Just four hours, not 140. The delay left Smit no choice but to formally ask the committee to issue a subpoena for the rest of the documents. This leaves many wondering about the accuracy of Benson’s X post at the end of January where she said, “As Secretary of State, I made sure any FOIA requests were not only met, but also placed on my website for anyone to see.”

With Oversight Committee Chair Jay DeBoyer now threatening a subpoena, MDOS may soon find out that transparency is more than just political jargon. If Benson’s department does not comply with DeBoyer’s request to hand over the election materials to the House, he stated that he would escalate the matter to the full committee to discuss issuing a subpoena.