About Jocelyn

Raised by two special education teachers in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Benson has spent her career advocating for efficient and transparent government that puts people first.
 

Jocelyn wants to bring change to Lansing: improving service, protecting pocketbooks, and making sure that elected officials work for citizens not corporate and special interests.
 

Today, as a law professor at Wayne State University Law School, she not only teaches Election law, Jocelyn has also published the first major book on the role of the Secretary of State in enforcing election and campaign finance laws. Benson's book, "State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process," highlights best practices of Secretaries on electoral reform from throughout the country.
 

From 2002-2004, she served as the Voting Rights Policy Coordinator of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, where she worked on the passage of the Help America Vote Act, the federal law that improved election law standards in the wake of the 2000 Presidential recount.  And in 2004 she helped with the Democratic Party’s national voter protection effort, recruiting, selecting and training Voter Protection coordinators in 21 states with the goal of ensuring that the 2004 election was conducted with integrity in accordance with the law.
 

In 2007 Jocelyn successfully led an effort to block the closing of a Secretary of State branch office in Buena Vista Township, convincing the United State Justice Department that the closure violated the Voting Rights Act.   During the 2008 election, she was called to testify before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, where she called on Secretary Land to ban the use of foreclosure lists to challenge voters’ eligibility on Election Day. Benson also developed and supervised two statewide nonpartisan election protection efforts in Michigan, in 2007 and 2008.
 

She is a frequent commentator on voting rights and election law on several local news and radio broadcasts, and has testified numerous times before the Ethics and Elections Committee of the Michigan House of Representatives. Jocelyn has also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
 

After earning her B.A. at Wellesley College, Jocelyn began her career at the Southern Poverty Law Center, investigating hate groups and hate crimes throughout the country.   She earned a MasterS of Philosophy as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and subsequently earned her law degree from Harvard Law School.
 

Benson lives in Detroit, Michigan, and is an enthusiastic Detroit Tigers fan. An avid long distance runner, Benson’s first marathon was the Detroit Marathon in 2005. She has completed nine full marathons, including races in Boston, Honolulu, New York City, Cleveland, Traverse City, and Philadelphia.