A ballot measure to limit political donations from Michigan’s public utilities and large government contractors is facing a challenge on its way to voters.
The challenge claims the Michiganders for Money Out of Politics campaign didn’t collect enough valid signatures to make the ballot. That’s based on a sample of a thousand signatures.
To qualify, at least 636 of those sampled signatures need to be valid.
The countercampaign Protect MI Free Speech is behind the signature challenge. It leveled several concerns with signatures in the sample, like duplicates, signatures that don’t match handwriting records, and wrong addresses.
Protect MI Free Speech spokesperson John Sellek said there are enough concerns to push the petition off the ballot. But, just in case, he wants election officials to consider issues his group said it found with the rest of the petitions too.
Sellek claimed petition circulators — who are meant to seek signatures from members of the public — instead signed their own sheets multiple times.
“If we're going to have these rules to protect what is a civic right here to initiate legislation outside the legislature, we can't have it done fraudulently. We can’t have circulators that are breaking the rules or breaking the law,” Sellek said.
The rules for petitions are strict. In 2022, several campaigns were knocked off the ballot when caught up in a scandal that involved petition circulators faking signatures.
Michiganders for Money Out of Politics says it’s confident in the signature sheets it turned in. Sean McBrearty is a co-chair for the campaign. Last week, ahead of the challenge deadline, he held a press conference in which he said the group had surpassed the requirements.
“First, we turned in more than 200,000 signatures above the threshold needed to qualify for the ballot, which is 356,958 valid signatures collected within 180 days. Second, our historic, grassroots petition effort was powered by thousands of volunteers who collected signatures in every single county across Michigan for more than a year. Third, before submitting our petitions, we spent weeks on quality control, working alongside statistical experts,” McBrearty said.
At the time, the signature challenge hadn’t yet come in. But McBrearty pre-emptively dismissed the concerns.
“Let’s be clear – any legal challenges to our petition signatures aren’t because we lack enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. It's because the massive corporations who oppose this initiative would rather grasp at any straw now to take us down – when it's cheapest – than fight us at the ballot box, where we have the support of 8 in every 10 Michiganders,” he said.
When asked for a comment Monday, the campaign stood by that statement.
Sellek argued raising those concerns, however, is part of ensuring the process is followed correctly.
“It's stunning that they would preemptively hold a press conference to claim that their signatures were perfect and pull the wool over the eyes of people who have some legitimate policy concerns they want discussed. And they're being lied to because, clearly the signatures are a mess,” Sellek said.
State elections bureau workers are currently going through the signatures and evaluating the challenges. They’re scheduled to make a recommendation to the Board of State Canvassers later this month on whether the petition should move forward.
