Speaker Pro Tem Rachelle Smit on Tuesday testified before the House Oversight Committee regarding a concerning lack of transparency from the Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and her office (MDOS). Smit outlined how MDOS stonewalled attempts by her office to access uncontroversial, basic election training information provided to election clerks and stored on the Bureau of Elections (BOE) E-Learning Portal.

“Secretary Benson repeatedly tells the public that her department is a paragon of transparency,” said Smit, R-Martin. “However, my four-month ordeal trying to obtain the most basic of records indicates otherwise. The way Secretary Benson operates her department is not transparency, it’s obfuscation.”

MDOS officials went as far as to say that the request would take 140 man-hours and would cost Smit’s office nearly $9,000. It was only pressure from the House Oversight Committee that led Benson’s office to release a substantial amount of the information requested by Smit, and it only took MDOS about four hours to do it.

“There is no scenario in which the documents I requested could take 140 man-hours to generate,” Smit said. “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.”

Smit made her first request to MDOS on Nov. 7, 2024. Officials told Smit then that her request could not be fulfilled.

She then filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the information. However, Smit said the FOIA request should have been unnecessary because of the Legislature’s status as a coequal branch of government.

On Nov. 21, the department said they could not provide the e-learning materials because they didn’t understand the FOIA request.

“Our request was unmistakably clear: simply to be given login credentials to the e-learning portal so we could review the training and instructions provided to Michigan clerks,” Smit said. “Yet, somehow, this was incomprehensible. All of these documents should be public and should not be hidden behind false privileges.”

On Jan. 7, 2025, MDOS officials told Smit that, to produce the requested documents, they would have to use 140-man hours and that her office would have to pay nearly $9,000. Smit called the response “ridiculous” and “obviously designed to deter my office from scrutinizing its elections management.”

On Feb. 6, Smit sent another request in her capacity as Chair of the Committee on Election Integrity. MDOS initially outright ignored her. Smit said she needed the information for “the most basic legislative purposes.”

“My staff followed up on the Feb. 6 request repeatedly, only to be met with obvious sandbagging and delay tactics,” Smit said. “Ultimately, the department promised they would produce some of the requested material, but not all. However, even this document production never materialized.”

After exhausting all options, Smit submitted her formal request for the Oversight Committee to subpoena the department for the information.

“If the Legislature cannot investigate – if it cannot review public documents – then its core functions in setting budgets and providing oversight into the operations of state government are being obstructed,” Smit said. “The obstruction of the Legislature is something that we need to put a stop to immediately.”

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Jay DeBoyer, R-Clay Township, said he would issue a letter requesting Benson and MDOS to release the remaining information within 10 business days. If the department fails to comply, DeBoyer said he would bring the issue back before the full committee to consider the issuance of a subpoena.

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