Chelsea Bossert/Daily Mining Gazette Democratic Candidate for Michigan Secretary of State, Suzanna Shkreli, poses outside The Daily Mining Gazette Office in downtown Houghton, Friday.

HOUGHTON — Michigan’s partisan conventions are fast approaching with voters having less than a month from knowing who will be on the ballots for key Michigan races. While the GOP State Endorsement Convention is Saturday in Novi, the similar convention for democrats is coming up April 19 in Detroit.

One candidate for the Democratic nomination for Michigan Secretary of State was recently in the Upper Peninsula. Susanna Shkreli visited the U.P. last week meeting with local Democrats, with stops in Houghton, St. Ignace, Ishpeming and Marquette, in hopes of obtaining the endorsement at next month’s convention.

While in Houghton, Shkreli visited the Daily Mining Gazette and spoke about her campaign, her qualifications and her plan if elected. Shkreli is a first-generation American, born to immigrant parents who fled authoritarianism in the Balkans. Shkreli said she’s proud of her status as a child of immigrants viewing it as the promise the American dream is for everyone and that hard work pays off.

“I grew up in a hardworking family in a family restaurant in Metro Detroit where we cook in real butter, make homemade biscuits and gravy,” she said. “So I understand the value of hard work and what good customer service means.”

After graduating from Oakland University in Rochester, Shkreli pursued a law degree at Cooley Law School in Lansing. She went on to become Macomb County’s Assistant Prosecutor where she said she worked to uphold the law and sought to protect children from criminals looking to exploit them.

“Starting my career as a prosecutor, spending nearly a decade doing that work — half of that time prosecuting crimes against children,” she said. “And that taught me to be strong.”

Shkreli then went on to be Deputy Legal Counsel for Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s office where she helped navigate the legal turbulence surrounding Michigan elections and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her campaign has stressed emergency response readiness and recognizes what is necessary to keep the state and the constitutional rights of its citizens safe.

“Disaster can strike whenever and it can take different forms. And so, during my time as deputy legal counsel to Governor Whitmer, we unfortunately saw a number of emergencies from COVID-19 to the Midland dam breaking,” she said. “But I also worked a meeting of the electors. And so we needed to have a posture of emergency preparedness because there was such a rise and has only gotten worse, this rise in extremism against our electoral process.”

Shkreli spoke about how, in his first term as president, President Donald Trump was critical about Michigan’s electoral process during the 2020 elections. Shkreli maintains even after the 2021 demonstration by right-wing groups at the Michigan State Capitol, she is committed to everyone’s right to vote.

“We delivered on the governor’s constitutional obligation to deliver the Presidential lectures to the National Archives to certify the elections. That was definitely a moment in time for me where I sat back and said, ‘wow, this is a troubling time for our nation,'” she said. “We have to get back to a place where we’re respecting one another, that we’re believing in truth… that we’re not undermining our processes with no evidence, right?”

Shkreli was Commissioner of the Michigan State Lottery from 2024 until the end of 2025. There, she helped streamline the processes for appointments and for digital delivery of messages. Shkreli said she hopes to bring that style of leadership to the Secretary of State’s office.

“I led a multi-billion dollar enterprise as the lottery commissioner and our entire mission was to maximize revenue to the school aid fund and during my tenure we delivered on providing more than two billion dollars to serve that purpose,” she said. “And so some of the things that I implemented there were working with Michigan State Police and engaging in [Amber Alerts] for all 10,000 plus retailers across the state.”

Shkreli said voting access has become another hot-button issue as of late. The SAVE Act, currently making its way through the United States Senate, aims to add additional guardrails to voting and requiring proof of citizenship before voting, something Shkreli disagrees with.

“There are things like the SAVE Act that are getting pushed through trying to require people to prove citizenship, even though we already have proved our citizenship when we registered to vote,” she said. “These things are, I think, solutions in search of a problem that doesn’t exist that are really being used to disenfranchise voters and to suppress the vote.”

Shkreli hopes to widen opportunities for Michigan residents voting by looking county-by-county and strengthen the current system. She spoke about the “Promote the Vote” ballot initiative that passed in 2018 and how it is currently impacting our voting process in a positive way. Nine-day early voting and mail in ballots are some of those initiatives now promised in the state constitution.

“Those initiatives got the muster they needed and got the signatures they needed to go on the ballot. And so that’s why there’s a shift and it takes time to implement these things, but we have implemented them — we continue to implement them,” she said. “Our state made a conscious decision to make voting easier for people. That’s why we’re seeing those increases in that type of voting, which is a good thing for our democracy.”

Shkreli and her campaign are hopeful to have not only the Upper Peninsula’s support at the endorsement convention, but the support of younger people as well. She remarked on how her campaign, which launched in December, has cultivated a grassroots funding response.

“Our campaign is proud of the work that we’ve done — the grassroots energy that we have. In the first three weeks of our campaign, which we launched in December, we raised over $300,000,” she said. “We’ve out-raised our opponents, and none of that money has been from corporate PACs or utility companies.”

With the Democratic endorsement convention approaching, Shkreli hopes with the help of connections she made with constituents in the U.P., she can win the nomination and be on the ballot for November.

“I am excited to be in this race. I believe that I’m the most qualified candidate for this moment in time,” she said. “I want to be Secretary of State; I don’t want to be governor. There are other candidates in this race that want other things. And this is too important to be a consolation prize. This is too important to be a coronation.”