The U.S. Department of Justice has taken the highly unusual step of filing a Statement of Interest in a Michigan trial-court case — telling the Court of Claims that electronic poll book data, including all metadata, are federal election records and that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is responsible for preserving them.
Statements of Interest from the Justice Department in pure state-court cases are rare. It is even rarer for DOJ to intervene at the trial-court level rather than on appeal. It is rare for the department to appear in a state trial court at all. The only recent election example is a 2022 Wisconsin circuit court case over absentee ballot witness addresses.
The filing lands in the middle of Bridgewater Township Clerk Michelle McQueer’s lawsuit challenging Benson’s rule that forces clerks to delete electronic poll book files just seven days after an election is certified.
