There are few of our rights that are considered more American – and fewer still that are as frequently tampered with – as that of our right to vote. Enter Jocelyn Benson, one of our country’s premier voices and tireless champions for voters’ rights, in Michigan and the rest of America.

A native of Pennsylvania, Benson is perhaps best known as a ruthlessly vocal advocate for voters’ rights and as an expert on secretary of state histories and job responsibility – not bad for the daughter of two middle income special education teachers. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Benson gained an early interest in social activism and community organizing, spurned by her parents’ idealistic commitment to education reform and teachers’ advocacy.

“I grew up with, from an early age, being filled with the idea that it’s upon all of us to make sure that everyone’s involved, and that everyone’s educated,” Benson says. “The least of us are who we must all focus on, because we all benefit when everyone’s engaged and everyone’s empowered and everyone’s educated in our country. I really got that value from [my parents].”

This budding interest in social justice soon blossomed into an influential and highly accomplished law career, nurtured by a stint in Montgomery, Alabama, where Benson took up service as an investigative journalist investigating white supremacist activity, having graduated early from Wellesley College. Having held a long-standing interest in Montgomery’s movement of civil rights disobedience in the 1960s, she quickly developed the kind of significant social outlook that would serve her well in her fight for social justice.

“I take my students every year to the bridge in Selma where the activists stood up against attacks from Alabama state troopers to march for voting rights,” she says, reflectively. “To me, remembering that struggle reconnects me to the sacrifices that were made by previous generations to secure the right to vote. Standing in the place where the march occurred gave me a sense of wanting to do whatever I could with my life, in this generation, to further the work of those activists who sacrificed so much.”

It wasn’t long before Benson met and married Ryan Friedrichs, a fellow social justice activist, and moved to Detroit to pursue a career in law, studying under the tutelage of Judge Damon Keith, one of the last of the great judges from the civil rights era. Since then, Benson has served as an Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School, and is in the process of penning a book that examines the crucial roles that a state’s secretary of state plays in the election administration process.

Still, Michigan voters need not fear the threat of disenfranchisement – Benson won’t be abandoning her effort to defend voters’ rights any time soon. Paying particular focus to both the 2000 and 2008 Presidential elections, she knows that we’ve come a long way from the days of the “white males only” exclusive club of American voters, but more than acknowledges that we still have a long way to go.

“In the general election of 2000, there was a significant loss of voter confidence in the election process due to what occurred during the Florida recount. Several states have enacted many reforms since that election, but not many in Michigan. There have been several reforms in other states, such as early voting and election day registration – policies that have an effect of promoting and ensuring a lot of people the right to vote fully, so that no one on election day has to wait in line for five hours,” Benson says. “What we saw in 2008 was a cautious expectation that things could go wrong, and we saw some success based on election reforms that had been enacted in the years following the election of 2000.

“Michigan was one of the first states in the country that enabled citizens to register to vote when they received their driver’s license, and that was such an innovative reform that it became a national law several years later,” Benson says. “So we’ve had that leadership in the past where we’ve been a model for other states, but we’ve really fallen behind. We’ve barely seen any election reform in recent years while other states are moving forward – they have early voting, they have options to register to vote online – all of these things.”

Clearly, there’s still much work to be done if Michigan wishes to regain a leadership position on election reforms. But with a determined and strong-willed fighter like Benson leading the charge, who’s to say we can’t take the country by its electoral reins?