Have you ever heard the name Garland Gilchrist?
If you don’t live in Michigan, you’ve probably never heard of him.
Scratch that—if you do live in Michigan, you’ve still probably never heard of him.
Gilchrist is running for Michigan Secretary of State to replace America’s most dishonest and non-transparent Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson. He has ZERO experience in elections and has never held a job that would qualify him to assume the important role of Michigan’s next top elections official, which will require cleaning up the corrupted voter rolls and completely revamping our broken elections.
Mr. Gilchrist is running against the most qualified candidate Michigan has had in over a decade, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini. Although he is running as a Republican, Anthony has a reputation for being fair and not allowing politics to enter his decision-making process. After 8 years of broken elections, Forlini has one goal: to make Michigan elections safe, secure, fair, and honest and to help make Michigan voters trust their elections again.
Most residents have no idea who Gretchen Whitmer tapped as her lieutenant governor back in 2018.
Gilchrist began his unremarkable career in Democrat politics as a community organizer and director of new media at the Center for Community Change. He also worked for George Soros’ MoveOn.Org as a national campaign director in Washington, D.C. He ran for city clerk in Detroit in 2017 and lost by a small margin to Detroit’s current Clerk Janice Winfrey.
After eight years as Whitmer’s forgettable #2, he briefly floated a primary challenge against Jocelyn Benson for governor, but it was decided for him that Jocelyn Benson would be the Democratic Party’s candidate; as a consolation prize, he was offered the Sec. of State position by the party.
Gilchrist says he wants to be Michigan’s next Secretary of State, but it doesn’t appear Gilchrist even understands the most basic elements of elections.
While reviewing almost 1 million documents our team received from Yehuda Miller, who successfully sued the City of Detroit for all of their election documents from the 2020 election, I was stunned to discover that Garland Gilchrist couldn’t even complete the most important required element of voting absentee: signing his envelope. In addition to putting the ballot in the envelope before sealing and sending it, the most basic legal requirement for a vote to count is to sign the envelope.
If a voter does not sign the absentee ballot return envelope in Michigan, the ballot is rejected and will not be counted unless the voter cures the deficiency in time. Under Michigan Election Law (MCL 168.764a and 168.766a), the voter must sign the certificate on the return envelope. The official instructions state that the signature must appear on the return envelope, or the ballot will not be counted. Clerks compare the signature on the envelope to the signature on file (typically from a driver’s license, state ID, or voter registration record). A missing signature is treated as a deficiency.
Written on the side of the envelope (where the clerk typically makes comments) is: Rejected for no sig. (signature) 10/20/2020, with the initials of the person who processed the envelope. When this happens, the clerk must notify the voter that, for their vote to count, they must come in and sign the ballot envelope, which it appears he did (his “cured” signature has been redacted).
He was against absentee (mail-in) ballots when he lost Detroit’s clerk’s race in 2017, saying they cause “chaos and confusion” and even called for a recount—but now, says he strongly supports “no reason” absentee ballot voting. Like Jocelyn Benson, Gilchrist is now in favor of making elections easier to cheat and is also against allowing the federal government to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
In January 2026 Gilchrist said a priority as secretary of state would be protecting personal data because the Trump administration is “thirsty to surveil” it “to feed to ICE so they can go in with Gestapo tactics and threaten and kill people.” He has also spoken at events and on social media using “ICE out” framing and opposing proposed detention facilities in Michigan (e.g., Romulus, Baldwin). He frames immigration enforcement as a threat to communities and has emphasized resisting federal overreach that could chill participation or sharing data.
During his short stint on the campaign trail for governor, the unremarkable Gilchrist made a Tik Tok video while lip syncing a song about doing drugs with the former trashy, one-term Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.
Remember that time when the Democrat Party told Garland Gilchrist, their first Black candidate for governor, to go to the back of the bus—that they had already chosen Jocelyn KKK Benson to be their candidate?
Michigan MUST vote for @tonyforlini1 for Sec of State. Not only was Sec of State his first and only choice, but he has tons of experience in elections!
Why would anyone elect a guy with no experience who accepted the role as a consolation prize?
— PattyMI (@PattyLovesTruth) November 1, 2026
Gilchrist is not only unqualified, but he’s also on board with Michigan’s Jew-hating U.S. Senate candidate El-Sayed. He doesn’t care about Abdulraham Mohammed El-Sayed’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and thinks he should be part of the US Intelligence Committee. Oh, and one last thing, as Michigan’s Heather Dow pointed out, he is also very lazy…
Leftist activist nominee for S.O.S. Garlin Gilchrist, on Abdul El-Sayed’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood: “It’s bullshit and it doesn’t matter.”
Also, Garlin Gilchrist: putting Abdul on the Senate Intelligence Committee would be “great.”
This is the guy who wants to process your ballot after only showing up to 5 of the 80 days he was supposed to preside over the Senate.
https://t.co/jIY1d8KsOJ
— Heather Dow (@PatriotPostGirl) October 24, 2026
Does Michigan really want a Secretary of State who didn’t even want the position and didn’t have the spine to stand up to the Democrat Party overlords? The Democrat Party essentially told a black man to shut up and sit down so the woman who sat on the board of the Southern Poverty Law Center while it was accused of funding KKK-linked figures—could assume the uncontested spot on the ballot for governor.
The post Dem Party Moves Unqualified and Unknown Candidate Into MI Sec of State Race to Clear Path for Jocelyn KKK Benson — Embarrassing New Evidence Reveals He Doesn’t Even Know How Absentee Ballots Work appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.