Jocelyn Benson

Jocelyn Benson (born October 22, 1977) is an American activist, politician, and former academic administrator. She is the 43rd Secretary of State of Michigan. Benson is a former dean of Wayne State University Law School, a co-founder of the Military Spouses of Michigan, and a board member of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality. She is the author of State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process (2010). In 2018, Benson was elected Secretary of State by an 8.9 percentage point margin, defeating Republican Mary Treder Lang and becoming the first Democrat to hold the office since Richard H. Austin left office in 1995. She was reelected in 2022, defeating Republican Kristina Karamo by 14 percentage points, the largest margin and vote share of any statewide candidate that year. Education and career Benson graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in 1999, where she founded the now-annual Women in American Political Activism conference and was the first student to be elected to serve in the governing body for the town of Wellesley, Massachusetts. She subsequently earned her master's in sociology as a Marshall Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, conducting research into the sociological implications of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. Prior to attending law school, Benson also lived in Montgomery, Alabama, where she worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center as an investigative journalist, researching white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. Benson has also worked as a summer associate for voting rights and election law for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and as a legal assistant to Nina Totenberg at National Public Radio.