WAYNE COUNTY, Mich. — A newly filed civil lawsuit is leveling serious accusations against the Michigan Department of State, alleging that racial discrimination was not only present under Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, but ignored, enabled, and allowed to metastasize within her administration.
Filed January 12 in Wayne County Circuit Court, the lawsuit was brought by four current and former department employees who allege they were treated differently because they are Black — targeted for discipline, subjected to heightened scrutiny, and denied advancement while other employees were allegedly shielded from similar treatment.
The plaintiffs — David Murray, Elvine Vanbolden, Mychael Foster, and former department official Nirva Civilus — describe a workplace where accountability flowed downward but favoritism flowed up, and where race allegedly played a decisive role in who was investigated, punished, or quietly pushed aside.
According to the complaint, Benson’s office failed at the most basic level of governance: there was no effective system to track discriminatory practices, no meaningful mechanism to correct them, and no internal safeguards to prevent bias from influencing management decisions.
“Defendants have no effective system in place to track, correct, or prevent this unlawful discriminatory conduct,” the complaint states.
That failure, the lawsuit argues, was not incidental — it was structural.
Adding weight to the allegations are sworn statements from former Assistant Secretary of State Heaster Wheeler, who is not a plaintiff but provided testimony describing internal policies so vague and inconsistently applied that they effectively invited biased enforcement. Wheeler said the lack of clarity and accountability inside the department factored directly into his decision to leave.
For critics, that testimony is particularly damning: when senior leadership exits citing internal dysfunction, it undercuts claims that discrimination complaints are merely misunderstandings or isolated grievances.
This lawsuit also follows a familiar and troubling pattern. Less than two years ago, the State of Michigan paid a $775,000 separation agreement to another employee after similar discrimination allegations emerged — a payout that raised questions about whether taxpayer money was being used to bury systemic problems rather than fix them.
Now, those same issues have resurfaced, this time with multiple plaintiffs, sworn statements from former executives, and detailed allegations describing a workplace culture allegedly hostile to equal treatment under Benson’s leadership.
Benson’s office has dismissed the lawsuit as “absolutely false,” asserting that department policies are clear, uniformly enforced, and intolerant of discrimination or retaliation. But the accumulating record — repeated lawsuits, corroborating testimony, and costly settlements — is beginning to strain the credibility of those denials.
No court has yet ruled on the claims, which remain allegations. Still, the lawsuit places Benson squarely at the center of a growing controversy, one that challenges her public image as a steward of fairness and transparency and raises the question of whether her office practiced internally what it demanded of others.
As the case moves forward, the issue is no longer whether these allegations are politically inconvenient — but whether Michigan’s top election official presided over an agency where discrimination was allowed to persist, uncorrected and unchallenged, on her watch.
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