Benson moved for dismissal of a case brought against her in November 2021 by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) for her failure to clean up the state's voter registration rolls—in an alleged violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

On Aug. 25, Benson's motion to dismiss the case was denied by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The court also denied the motions to intervene filed by the Detroit/Downriver Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Michigan Alliance for Retired Americans, and Rise Inc.

Additionally, PILF's suit seeks to force Benson to provide documentation of her efforts to remove deceased registrants from the voter rolls, something she has thus far also failed to do.

Names of 25,975 Deceased Voters

PILF notified Benson of the problem in September 2020 and again in November 2020, a year before it filed its lawsuit.

The foundation provided Benson with the names of 25,975 voters who had died but were still on Michigan's voter rolls, as were discovered by its research. Of these, 23,663 registrants had been dead for five years or more, and 17,449 had been dead for at least a decade.

The study found that 3,956 registrants had been dead for at least 20 years.