Former gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon and former Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson are raising the alarm about the state’s bloated voter rolls, rapidly changing election rules, and rampant partisanship from the state’s top election official.

Dixon on Monday hosted Johnson, now a state senator from Holly, on the Tudor Dixon Podcast to discuss Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s leadership in a critical battleground state, where former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remain deadlocked a week out from Election Day.

Dixon noted Benson is among seven Democratic secretaries of state in key swing states who’ve said are coordinating on the 2024 election, and she looked to Johnson to provide context on how that’s playing out in Michigan.

“It’s really hard to hold somebody accountable in the ivory tower in Lansing, especially when they’re so partisan. I’ve just never seen anything like it,” Johnson said. “I think our bloated rolls are really one of the key problems that we see right now.”

She added: “As of today, we have 106.5% of the eligible electorate registered to vote. I’m not a mathematician, but 106.5 is not good.”

The percentage works out to about 8.4 million voter registrations for a voting age population of roughly 7.9 million, prompting questions from the public about the discrepancy. Elon Musk, billionaire owner of X, raised concerns last week, triggering fierce blowback from Benson, who labeled the world’s richest man a “troll” and alleged in mainstream media appearances he’s spreading “misleading information” that’s “really dangerous.”

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“Then she goes on to criticize Elon Musk for getting people registered to vote, but she did the same exact thing with Rock the Vote, and she actually did it right out of her state office and she said she let them help write the programs,” Johnson said.

“These double standards and deceptions, and I would say lies, are going to make people wonder at the end, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican that wins.”

Johnson suggested Benson “just doesn’t want to clean the rolls,” pointing to her legal fights against efforts to remove ineligible voters in 2020. A Republican lawsuit eventually forced Benson to remove 177,000 ineligible registrations, but the ruling did not come until after her office mailed out 800,000 prefilled absentee ballot requests to those nonqualified voters and others, Johnson said.

“It’s very frustrating for me,” said Johnson, who served as Michigan’s top election official from 2011 to 2019. “When I was there, I took off 1.3 million people off our qualified voter file, and that was 642,000 dead people, 149,000 people that had moved, and I did find 3,505 noncitizens, so it’s very concerning to me we have a secretary of state that’s so partisan.”

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The partisan leadership extends to Benson’s political donations through her Michigan Legacy PAC, which contributed $82,500 to two Michigan Supreme Court candidates, including an appointed incumbent who made critical decisions on election-related cases involving her office.

The PAC also donated at least $400,000 to Democratic state House candidates and others running for judicial posts, but none to Republicans.

“I’m very concerned about her donating money, money she got from California, by the way,” Johnson said. “She’s only had three donors, and they’re all from California.”

“There’s a massive amount of money coming into the state. It’s not Michigan money,” Dixon concurred. “They’re people from outside of the state who know that if they win Michigan they can take power in DC. That to me is incredibly dangerous that she accepts that and then she uses that money to play politics herself inside of the state.”

The Supreme Court donations and Benson’s representations in court cases to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Michigan ballot compelled Johnson to file a complaint with the State Bar of Michigan’s Attorney Grievance Commission on Oct. 11. The Supreme Court, and Benson’s preferred candidate, Justice Kyra Bolden, ultimately allowed Benson to block Kennedy’s removal.

“I did turn her in to the attorney grievance commission because in fact the deadline had already passed” when Benson amended the ballot to include Kennedy, Johnson said. “It had already been certified … by the lower courts.”

“I think people want a non-partisan secretary of state,” Johnson told Dixon. “Michigan now has what I would call an operative for the far left.”

The two also discussed changes to early vote counting, and deceptive advertising for a 2022 ballot referendum backed by Benson that allows for voting with no identification, voter registration with no ID, and registration up until Election Day, among many other changes.

“We have no real-time system to check to see if they’re eligible to vote or if they’ve already voted in another location, that includes in our state,” Johnson said. “We have nothing systematically to tell us whether they voted out of state.”

Johnson told Dixon she repeatedly confronted Benson about those issues and others during committee meetings in the upper chamber, until Benson stopped attending those meetings.

“She does not show up to the meetings anymore,” Johnson said. “You can’t ask her questions.”

The pattern of partisanship is concerning, Dixon noted, because Benson, a former hate crimes investigator for the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center, is expected to administer her own election for governor in 2026.

“I think this is something nationally we need to look at. You’ve got these secretaries of state who are running on being nonpartisan and then running their own elections to higher office. Like if you look at Arizona, Katie Hobbs was secretary of state, ran her own election to become governor,” Dixon said. “We know that’s Jocelyn Benson’s plan too. She has made it clear she will run for governor.”

Other discussion focused on constant complaints from constituents about many aspects of the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, billions in corporate welfare in recent record Michigan budgets, and increasingly opaque government operations under Democratic leadership.

“This is a long-term plan on the Democrats’ side to turn purple states blue,” Dixon said. “But I think it’s more nefarious than that.

“I think that what they’re plotting, … if you look at the way (Benson) is running the office, this is not the American way,” she said. “This is to get their way, to gain power for their people.”