Michigan’s top elections official defended the state’s elections after repeated attacks on X from Elon Musk, who spread false claims about inactive voters.
Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, corrected Musk multiple times in recent days and called his comments on voter list maintenance “dangerous disinformation”.
Musk first reposted a video about inactive voters who remain on Michigan’s rolls, saying: “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!?”
Musk has a penchant for sharing false, misleading or incomplete information about elections and voting processes. Elections officials have reached out to him to attempt to correct the misinformation on multiple occasions, which has not quelled his tweets on the topic. He has emerged as a major spreader of rightwing conspiracies about voting in advance of the November election, and he is spending many millions of his dollars to help elect Donald Trump.
Benson responded to Musk this week, noting that there were not more voters than citizens in Michigan – the state has 7.9 million people of voting age and 7.2 million active registered voters. Musk was “pushing a misleading number that includes 1.2m inactive records slated for removal in accordance with the law”, she said.
She pointed people to a state government website with election facts, which explains how inactive voters must remain on the rolls according to state and federal law until a waiting period of two federal elections has passed, which could be up to four years. More than 600,000 voters are “slated for cancellation” in 2025 and 2027 because of inactivity, the site notes.
Musk wasn’t deterred. He pulled out her middle name, saying: “Jocelyn Michelle Benson, shame on you for blatantly lying to the public! You only plan to remove the ineligible voters AFTER this election. That necessarily means that there are far more people registered to vote than there eligible voters.”
Benson again responded to Musk, sharing the election facts website and saying: “In Michigan we tell the truth and we follow the law. I suggest you do the same.”
On CNN, Benson said Musk’s comments were “very concerning” because of the size of his platform, and that she wished people with large platforms would use them to spread accurate election information instead.
“If you have enough time to Google me and look up my middle name, which he clearly did, you should be able to find out the facts of our elections and post those as well,” she said.
The Republican National Committee has sued Michigan over its voter rolls, part of a swath of lawsuits the group has filed across the country that seek to limit voting access and set the stage for false claims of voter fraud. Some states have sought to purge their voter rolls this year, alleging that inflated rolls with inactive or otherwise ineligible voters could lead to fraud, but these purges can boot eligible voters from the rolls.
Voter list maintenance is done regularly by elections officials, who compare voter data to other sources to remove people who have died, moved or otherwise lost their ability to vote. But elections officials must carefully balance list accuracy and removing voters – mistakes can deprive eligible voters of their right to vote.
