Jocelyn Benson Took a Field Trip to the Southern Poverty Law Center

Jocelyn Benson tries to minimize her involvement with the Southern Poverty Law Center—the place where she started her career, the place where she served on the board for a half-decade.

But recently released files show that Benson once led a field trip of Secretaries of State from around America to the Montgomery, Alabama, offices of the SPLC.

The Michigan House Oversight Committee, led by Republicans, just released a tranche of emails showing Benson’s involvement with the SPLC, even after she’d left the organization.

The May 2019 field trip is the star of the show. Benson and her Alabama counterpart, John Merrill, led a group of 20 Secretaries of State to Alabama on a “voting rights tour.” The tour even had a hashtag on Twitter, #sosdemocracy2019.

Then Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs joined the tour. Like Hobbs did in 2022, Benson is overseeing the 2026 Michigan governor’s race while running in it.

The group visited churches, and Benson sat in the front row. They stood arm-in-arm on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where a cop cracked the late John Lewis’s head during “Bloody Sunday” in 1965.

“For the first time in history, 20 Secretaries of State from across the country crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge this morning in Selma, Alabama,” Benson tweeted. “We are here to find common ground & learn from the voting rights history that informs our work today. Onward we march. #sosdemocracy2019.”

The National Association of Secretaries of State, which helped organize the field trip, called the visit to Southern Poverty Law Center “meaningful.” It tagged the Michigan Secretary of State office in the tweet. News stories describe the SPLC as aiding in the field trip.

In one Michigan Secretary of State tweet, it shows Benson hand-in-hand with several other activists, making a human chain. Benson closes her eyes, presumably in deep thought.

The man standing two people to Benson’s left is David Becker, founder of the Electronic Registration Information Center. Benson enrolled Michigan in ERIC her first week in office. In 2020, Becker returned the favor, sending Benson’s nonprofit $12 million dollars from another group he controls, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, or CEIR.

For years, every time Benson aspired to a new job, she touted her Southern Poverty Law Center ties, and the Southern Poverty Law Center promoted that one-time intern who rose to statewide elected official.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the governor’s office. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged a host of shady practices at the NGO, including its funding of the same “hate groups” like the Ku Klux Klan that it claimed to oppose.

Since then, Benson has walked sideways away from the SPLC.

Board trustees for nonprofits have a duty to oversee the operations and finances of those organizations. Calling her board position “ceremonial” is Benson’s way of shirking those duties, basically saying she wanted the resume line, but not the work associated with it.

Ahead of the May visit, Benson sent an April 17, 2019 email to an SPLC staffer, referencing a “bumpy winter” at the SPLC.

A week before Benson left the board, SPLC founder and Benson mentor Morris Dees was fired after a misconduct investigation. Which is to say, Benson didn’t leave the SPLC until Dees did.

Dees also donated $950 to Benson during her 2018 run for Michigan Secretary of State.

Benson won Michigan Secretary of State in November 2018, and took office in January 2019.

In her telling of events, Benson cut ties with the NGO as soon as she was sworn in.

But the official record tells a different story. Her departure lines up with Dees’s firing, not with her taking office.

In March 2019, a reporter named Tyler O’Neil noted that Benson was no longer listed on the SPLC’s board of directors. On Twitter, he asked why.

The official Michigan Secretary of State page responded, rather than Benson from her own page.

“Upon taking office as Michigan Secretary of State, Secretary Benson informed SPLC leadership that she would be stepping down from the board,” @michSOS tweeted. “Her responsibilities in Michigan are her priority and focus.”

But O’Neil had receipts. And the receipts showed Benson listed as a board member just a day prior. Not only that, but her biography had her new job title as Michigan Secretary of State. So it’s not like it was an old page that hadn’t been removed yet.

In the 30 pages of emails released by the House Oversight Committee, Secretary of State staff re-routed requests on SPLC matters to Benson’s campaign staff.

But in March 2019, the Secretary of State page did the talking.

The 30-page email cache ends with a Freedom of Information Act request from Mike Cox, a former Michigan Attorney General and then-candidate for governor.

“Secretary Benson is not merely a private citizen with a past professional association,” Cox writes in the April 26 request, sent just week after the SPLC indictments were announced. “She is Michigan’s current chief election officer, a statewide elected official, and a candidate for governor. Her office oversees elections, campaign finance, voter registration, public communications about elections, and the official machinery by which Michigan voters place trust in the democratic process.”

“The request asks a simple and important public question,” the request reads.

Cox wrote the following part in bold: “Did Michigan’s chief election officer, her senior staff, or the Department of State communicate, coordinate, partner, rely upon, or maintain official contact with SPLC while Benson served as Secretary of State?”

“The public has a right to know the answer,” Cox wrote.

Benson has denied answers. But she cannot escape scrutiny through Nov. 3.