Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s campaign to encourage residents to report “misleading or inaccurate information” in 2024 is raising serious questions about the motivations behind the effort.

Ted Bolema, a senior fellow economist with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, on Tuesday laid out several concerns with recent advice from Benson’s Bureau of Elections regarding “election misinformation.”

A flyer from the bureau contends “counteracting harmful misinformation by knowing the truth is critical to not only ensuring our elections are a secure and accurate reflection of the will of the people, but to the survival of our democratic process.”

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The flyer, which calls on Michiganders report neighbors for misleading information to the bureau, argues residents have a responsibility to encourage an “honest dialogue” and encourages them to vet political claims during the 2024 presidential election with Benson’s department, local clerks, or three sites that provide “trusted, verified nonpartisan information.”

The sites include Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact.

Benson “must have immense trust in these outfits to outsource to them the responsibility of separating political fact from political fiction,” Bolema wrote, noting the descriptions of the sites on the flyer “focuses more on political content and not on frauds that may suppress voting or confuse voters about when or where to vote.”

“These three appointed fact-checker organizations are well known for their left-leaning bias. They routinely review subjective topics like political rhetoric and political satire, sometimes with the apparent intention of getting whole publications removed from internet platforms,” Bolema wrote. “As liberal journalist Ben Smith once wrote about these fact checkers, ‘At their worst, they’re doing opinion journalism under pseudo-scientific banners, something that’s really corrosive to actual journalism, which if it’s any good is about reported fact in the first place.’”

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Bolema also notes that the fact-checking organizations have only about 50 employees, are not located in Michigan, and appear to have no expertise in state election law.

“It seems a stretch to expect them to review all the potentially inaccurate information voters will hear this election season,” he wrote.

Bolema cites U.S. Supreme Court precedent on teaching communism in 1927 and lies about military medals in 2012 that found more speech, rather than censoring speech, is the correct approach to countering misinformation.

In the latter, Bolema notes, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true.”

“Secretary of State Benson’s misinformation initiative appears to take the opposite approach,” Bolema wrote. “It would squash misinformation, at least that identified by left-leaning, fact-checking organizations.

“At this point, it is not clear what the Secretary of State plans to do with political statements these private organizations find objectionable. But using government resources to issue rebuttals to information that private third parties flag as misinformation will inevitably favor one political party over the other.”

Benson, who spent a portion of her career vetting other people’s perspectives as a “hate crime investigator” for the Southern Poverty Law Center, has faced similar criticism for her efforts to promote voting through youth outreach, Veterans Affairs offices, and Small Business Administration sites in predominantly Democratic areas of the state this year.

Benson also backed legislation that will block county canvassers from investigating fraud, fought efforts to remove ineligible voters from the state’s bloated voter rolls, issued unconstitutional election guidance to local clerks, employed the media to “protect the minds of voters,” promoted election misinformation about former President Donald Trump, repeatedly targeted the world’s richest man for supporting Trump, and blocked competition from third parties on Michigan’s presidential ballot.

It’s for those reasons and more that former Michigan Secretary of State turned state Sen. Ruth Johnson, R-Holly, argues Benson is “Michigan’s most partisan Secretary of State who has violated more laws and the Constitution than all the secretary of states in recent history.”

Benson’s efforts have been aided and abetted by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, and Democrats who control the legislature, Johnson told The Midwesterner.

“We’ve stripped away periodically over the years now the integrity and checks and balances and transparency of our elections,” she said. “We’re doing a great disservice to everyone because when we get done with an election we need to be assured it was done with transparency.”