Election Officials in Swing States and the 2024 Election

Jocelyn Benson is Michigan’s 43rd Secretary of State. A graduate of Harvard Law School and expert on civil rights law, education law and election law, Benson served as dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. Prior to her election, she served as CEO of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality (RISE), which harnesses the the unifying power of sports to improve race relations. Benson is co-founder and former president of Military Spouses of Michigan. In 2015, she became one of the youngest women in history to be inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.

Karen Brinson-Bell became executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections on June 1, 2019. As the state’s chief elections official, she leads about 65 full-time employees at the state agency, which is charged with administering elections and overseeing the 100 county boards of elections. North Carolina has more than 7 million registered voters and is the 9th most populous state in the country. Karen has spent most of her career in elections administration, serving as director for the Transylvania County (N.C.) Board of Elections and then before that as a district elections technician for the State Board of Elections, where she supported 12 county boards in western N.C. Karen was deputy director of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center.

In 2022, Adrian Fontes was elected as Arizona’s 21st Secretary of State. Secretary Fontes is a proud Arizona native, an honorable veteran of the United States Marine Corps, and the father of three daughters. Secretary Fontes served on active duty from 1992 to 1996. After graduating from law school, Secretary Fontes was a prosecutor with the Denver District Attorney and then at the Maricopa County Attorney’s office. He practiced law for 15 years before he was elected to be Maricopa County Recorder in 2016.

Gov. Josh Shapiro appointed Al Schmidt as Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth on Jan. 17, 2023 and Schmidt officially became Secretary on June 29, 2023. Prior to his appointment, Schmidt was president and chief executive officer at the Committee of Seventy, a nonprofit and nonpartisan good-government organization focused on strengthening democracy and combatting political corruption.

Before joining the Committee of Seventy, Schmidt served for 10 years as a Philadelphia City Commissioner. Secretary Schmidt is a former senior analyst at the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and served as a policy analyst for the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.