State Rep. Rachelle Smit on Friday released the following statement after the Michigan Department of State (MDOS) released some materials following a subpoena for information by the House Oversight Committee. Nearly all the information appears to be newsletters sent to clerks over the years and not the training materials originally requested by Smit last fall:

“Leave it to our Secretary of State to ‘transparently’ dump 1,900 pages of the wrong stuff on a Friday afternoon. 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 refusing to give us access anyway.”

This afternoon, MDOS issued a press release today promoting a new so-called “Election Transparency” website—implying it fulfills the House’s request. It does not.

Benson also claimed her office spent thousands of taxpayer dollars and “hundreds of hours” compiling these documents. A cursory review shows otherwise: most were already published elsewhere.

Despite months of negotiations, Benson is still refusing to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena, citing vague concerns over “sensitive information”— even though the committees are legally entitled to review training documents related to Michigan’s election procedures.

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