MDOS releases thousands of pages of election documents in response to House Oversight Committee

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office made nearly 2,000 pages of election documents public Friday after providing them to a legislative oversight committee.

The Michigan Department of State materials include training newsletters sent to clerks, the clerk training accreditation manual and the Election Day “flip chart” manual used by election workers at the polls.

Combined with documents previously released to the committee, there are now more than 3,000 pages of election documents available on the department’s website.

A press release from the department said it will continue to release additional materials after reviewing them to redact any sensitive information that it says could compromise election security.

“Everyone at the Michigan Department of State is committed to transparency and openness to the people we serve,” said Khyla Craine, the department’s chief legal director. “We are also committed to protecting sensitive information which, if publicly released, could be used by bad actors to interfere with the chain of custody of ballots, tamper with election equipment, or impersonate a clerk on Election Day.”

But Rep. Rachelle Smit (R-Martin), who chairs the House Election Integrity Committee, said the documents provided so far have primarily been newsletters that do not match the training materials requested by legislators.

“Leave it to our Secretary of State to ‘transparently’ dump 1,900 pages of the wrong stuff on a Friday afternoon,” Smit said. “We will conduct a thorough review of everything her department released today. But, after sifting through the information for several hours, we’ve yet to see much of the substantive training materials we requested. Secretary Benson knows what we are asking for, and she [is] refusing to give us access anyway.”

Benson’s office says reviewing the documents has “required hundreds of hours and cost thousands of taxpayer dollars to review and produce.”

While the House Oversight Committee voted last month to issue a subpoena for the documents, the department says it will “continue to release additional materials to the Committee and on the public site once the department’s legal and election security teams are able to review them and redact any sensitive information that could compromise election security.”