DETROIT – New Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson surveyed her kingdom during her first 100 days in office, personally visiting all 131 branch offices throughout the state.
What she found was a mess – or as she put it, a situation that was “devastating, heartbreaking, and “unacceptable.”
“We inherited a broken system,” said Ms. Benson, the first Democrat to hold Michigan’s oldest cabinet post in almost a quarter of a century. She blamed “short-term solutions over the years,” before she was elected last fall, and promised to fix things.
What she found was long lines; people having to wait hours to be seen when they were told it would be only 10 minutes; a system of self-service kiosks where two-thirds provided only limited service and one-third did not work at all.
In Dearborn, where many of the customers speak only Arabic, a branch office had no Arabic-speaking employees at all.
Ms. Benson, the 41-year-old former dean of the Wayne State University Law School, promised during her campaign that she’d put in place a guarantee that any customer would be in and out of any branch office in 30 minutes or less.
However, after her statewide tour, she indicated she might not be able to achieve that until towards the end of her term, or 2022.
“That goal is very much at the front of my mind,” she said.
Her ability to accomplish her goals is likely to achieve a lot of scrutiny, because for most Michiganders, the Secretary of State is the one branch of government they absolutely have to connect with.
Most people can go a lifetime without interacting with the attorney general’s office, or the governor, but anyone who drives a vehicle or owns a car or a boat has to visit one of the Secretary of State’s branch offices.
The Michigan Secretary of State is also responsible for all elections. Citizens’ experience with the branch offices has differed widely. Ernest Dubrul, a retired biology professor in Luna Pier, said that his family has usually been able to do all their business by mail, and when they did have to visit an office, his experience has been “reasonable wait times as long as we didn’t go at the busiest hours.”
However, the last time this columnist had to renew his driver’s license, he had to wait long enough to get through a good chunk of a thick Russian novel. This year, when I went to renew my car registration at a small branch office in northern Michigan, they had no record of the license plate the same office issued me two years ago.
What’s more, they told me they had given the same plate to someone else – which was unnerving. The manager, who was helpful, had to call Lansing to get permission to issue me a new plate.
Later, she told me that they had changed computer programs in February, and that they evidently lost my data then. I wondered how many other people this had happened to, but when I asked, I didn’t get an answer from the department’s public relations office.
Despite all this, there is reason for optimism. Ms. Benson is a driven achiever who has been called the best-prepared person ever to assume the office of Secretary of State. A graduate of Harvard University law school and the youngest female dean of a major law school in history, she is the author of a well-reviewed book, Secretaries of State, Guardians of the Democratic Process.
She’s also not someone who lets obstacles get in her way; she ran in — and completed — the Boston Marathon when she was more than eight months pregnant. Taking on challenges runs in her family; her husband, Ryan Friedrichs, joined the army in his 30s and jumped out of planes in Afghanistan. His wife promptly started a support group called Military Spouses of Michigan.
The one problem she may face in improving the branch offices is money. Mr. Dubrul worries that making the offices more efficient will mean increasing the number of staff and “a move to increase Democratic patronage, which at first glance … it sure appears to be.”
Branch office employees are, however, non-political civil servants. So far, Ms. Benson has declined to talk about whether she will ask for more appropriations, saying only that she is a “fiscally conservative leader.” She did say that improving the self-service kiosks could help cut her department’s $7 million postage bill.
But things won’t be put right quickly – though she did hire two Arabic-speaking employees for the Dearborn office.
“There’s no quick fix,” she told reporters. Whether her honesty is appreciated by the voters is yet to be seen.
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Political Trivia Factoid: Jimmy Carter, 94, has now become the oldest former president in America history. But he holds another distinction too: While no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, Mr. Carter is the only Democrat in more than 70 years to get elected without winning Michigan.
