As candidate fields become clear and campaigns gear up months ahead of November elections, several major candidates have been reaching out to Arab Americans for support, including Democratic candidate for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Jocelyn Benson

Benson is scheduled to meet with local Arab American activists and business leaders on Feb. 22.
Benson, a national voting rights advocate and Wayne State University law professor, is up against Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey on the Democratic side. Democratic Party leaders will nominate a candidate in the summer. Five Republicans have also said they’ll seek their party’s nomination for the position.

Republican Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land will leave the office at the end of 2010 because of term limits. She is expected to run for lieutenant governor as Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard’s running mate.

Benson is an election law expert who’s been developing nationwide and statewide election protection programs for the Democratic Party and non-partisan efforts since 2004.

“My background is in protecting the vote however I can,” she said.

She said she decided to run after becoming familiar with secretaries of state across the country and learning how important the office is to maintaining fair elections.

“It came out of the inspiration of getting to know other secretaries of state and wanting to bring a lot of their ideas and best practices to Michigan,” she said.

Benson studied law at Harvard and sociology at Oxford after spending time investigating white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

“I started my career at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery where I was working to investigate hate groups and hate crimes in Alabama and I think it was just impossible to be down there and not become inspired by all the work that has been done and all the sacrifices that were made so that the right to vote could be accessible to everyone,” she said.

“The 2000 election, I think, showed that if you don’t have a secretary of state who’s going to abide by the laws and allow a full recount to ensure that all the votes are counted, then everything we fight for is called into question.”

Benson said she hopes to modernize voter registration and advocate for early voting and more widespread absentee voting.

“I supervised a precinct in the November 2008 Detroit election and we actually had to turn people away because they hadn’t registered 30 days ahead of time,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to have to tell someone they can’t vote simply because they didn’t register a month before the election.”

She said that as secretary of state she would advocate and work for online voter registration and on-the-spot registration on election day at the polls.

“We just want to make sure that it’s not a barrier to making people vote,” she said.

She also said she’d “ensure that voters are protected against voter intimidation and confusion.”

She mentioned incidents in Hamtramck in 1999 in which voters of apparent Middle Eastern descent or Muslim faith were questioned at the polls about their citizenship. The U.S. Justice Department later intervened.

“We’re talking about citizens who were born in the United States or people who had been here for decades and voting for decades,” she said. “They were sort of treated as if they were not equal, when the great thing about the fundamental right to vote is, on election day, everyone is equal. Everyone has an equal voice in the political process. So I think the secretary of state has a responsibility to stand up in response to incidents like that and intervene to ensure that those intrusions in the electoral process are eliminated.”

The secretary of state’s office also administers driver’s licensing, and Benson said driver’s education materials also need modernization.

“Right now our driver’s education doesn’t include information about driving while texting and those dangers,” she said.

In 2008, Benson helped the ACLU sue the secretary of state over denying driver’s licenses to non-permanent immigrant workers after an opinion from the state attorney general’s office suggested that only U.S. citizens and individuals with green cards are eligible.

The legislature eventually passed a law to remedy the issue, allowing documented temporary workers and international students to be issued licenses.

On the issue of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, Benson said the law clearly prohibits their issuance, but that she’s committed to meeting with immigrant communities to discuss safety issues.

“I’d need to enforce the law as it’s written,” she said, “which is pretty clear in saying you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t have the appropriate documentation. But I’d certainly work with all communities to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to keep the roads safe, and I have committed to meeting with various community groups once we’re in there to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to help process driver’s license applications appropriately.”

Benson’s campaign has led in early fundraising efforts, raising nearly $228,000 in 2009, and has garnered endorsements from a number of unions like the American Federation of Teachers and lawmakers like U.S. Rep. John Conyers and state Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

“We’ve built a campaign that ‘s going to be poised to win in November,” she said.

Tlaib said Benson stands alone in her nation-wide voter protection background.

“Jocleyn is a professor of election law, voter rights advocate and the only candidate that has met with over 30 other secretary of state heads across the country and looked at the best practices,” Tlaib said. “She is the most qualified. She also understands the challenges currently with services at sos offices, including inconsistency in rules implementation, driver’s license policy and lack of access to voting.”