Xiong Sings Benson’s Favorite Song (WATCH!)
- Jun 18
- 5 min read
Tone-Deaf Rep appeals to MIT authority
By Kristine Christlieb, MFEI News & Commentary Editor
On March 22, 2024, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab ranked Michigan’s administration of the 2022 midterm elections second in the nation.
The next day, Benson was posting about the ranking on X, giving her followers a heads up she would be appearing on MBNBC’s The Weekend. “I’m up and ready to share how Michigan’s elections are safe, secure and accurate and why @MITelelectionlab just ranked our systems #2 in the nation.”
Singing praise to the MIT experts’ ranking has become one of Benson’s favorite songs, and now a freshman member of the Michigan legislature is joining in.
At the June 3, 2025, Michigan House Election Integrity Committee hearing, Rep. Mai Xiong (D-District 13) chimed in with a question for election data expert Braden Giacobazzi. a question that set her up to invoke the MIT number two ranking.
Xiong: “I get that you’re critical of the Secretary of State, but Michigan is ranked second by the MIT Science Lab, this wasn’t a number that the Secretary of State just made up, that Michigan is second in elections.”
Giacobazzi: “No, it’s not a number that she [Jocelyn Benson] made up, it’s a number that MIT made up.”
Barely containing her shock, Xiong followed up: “As an engineer, are you saying you don’t respect the MIT institution and the scientists that are involved in ranking Michigan as second?”
It’s not clear Xiong understood how hollow an appeal to authority sounds to post-Covid ears. Experts, especially elite university experts, and their evidence are now almost universally suspect.
Beyond Covid, its easy to think of all the ways people have been betrayed by the experts: Failure to predict the 2008 global financial crisis, Y2K catastrophe overpredictions, climate model overestimations, dot-com bubble misjudgments, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, President John Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman, the 2020 election was the most secure election ever.
But Xiang most certainly had no idea Giacobazzi himself had a prior affiliation with MIT, that she was speaking to an MIT expert. He told her, “As a former employee of MIT Lincoln Lab, I would tell you that they are very intelligent, very wonderful people. However, the study itself was run by very biased organizations that funded it, so it’s very suspect. And also, the staff at MIT tends to lean on one side of the aisle very heavily.”
It likely didn’t matter what Giacobazzi said. Xiang has her mind made up. Her TikTok account has a special Election Deniers TV playlist with six videos she’s produced. A running theme is her boredom with Michigan House Election Integrity Committee expert testimony.
In the description of her Election Deniers TV playlist, she doesn’t try to hide her contempt, writing, “Get your popcorn ready for the Election Deniers Reality TV show. Produced by Michigan Republican House Speaker Matt Hall. Staring [sic] Former Township Clerk chairwoman; right-leaning conspiracy theorists groups; Rep. Mai Xiong and other prominent state representatives.”
The funding sources to which Giacobazzi referred were the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, and the Democracy Fund. Acknowledgement of these funding sources can be found on the MIT Election Data Science Lab website.
According to Influence Watch, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation contributed nearly $100 million in grants toward “democracy”-related causes and organizations between 2014-2018. Influence Watch also points out The Joyce Foundation “finances advocacy for gun control, environmental causes, and liberal education policy; opposition to right-of-center election reforms and left-of-center media outlets.”
Democracy Fund has a more tangled profile. It is a “center-left voter registration and mobilization group” affiliated with the Democrat Party and the notorious Sixteen Thirty Fund.
In an upcoming guest article from Captain Seth Keshel (Captain K’s Corner on Substack), MFEI subscribers will learn more about the flawed nature of the MIT study. Stay tuned!
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