LANSING, MI – The ballot for the Aug. 2 primary election in Michigan was shaken up this week after the Michigan Board of State Canvassers ruled 19 candidates should be disqualified from the ballot over petition errors and fraud.
There were 32 candidates facing disqualification from the primary election ballot this week, including six candidates for Michigan governor, seven candidates for U.S. representative and 19 candidates for circuit and district court judges.
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers only found 13 of those 32 candidates to have filed sufficient petitions to qualify for the ballot during its meeting Thursday, May 26. The other 19 candidates were disqualified, and will have to file an appeal in court before June 3 if they want to get back on the ballot.
Five Republican candidates for governor were among those disqualified from the ballot after they submitted thousands of fraudulent signatures on their petitions. Those candidates were James Craig, Perry Johnson, Donna Brandenburg, Michael Markey Jr. and Michael Brown.
The disqualified candidates still have the option to appeal the board’s decision in court, meaning they could potentially get back on the Aug. 2 ballot with a lawsuit. But the timeline is tight – candidates will have to get it sorted out in court before June 3, the date when ballots must be finalized ahead of absentee voting.
Thursday’s meeting was long and grueling, as the board spent eight hours poring over reports of petition errors and fraud against the 32 candidates. Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater was there to break down the details of all 32 cases.
The board also heard testimony from most of the candidates who were up for disqualification, or from their attorneys.
Here are six key takeaways from the meeting, and what the decisions mean for Michigan voters:
1. 5 gubernatorial petitions were riddled with fraud
It is still unclear who will be held responsible for the estimated 68,000 fake signatures that were found among 10 candidate campaigns, but one thing is certain: The petitions for five major gubernatorial candidates were riddled with fraud.
The state’s elections director called it an “unprecedented scale of fraud” that left the Bureau of Elections with a massive amount of work to do in a short period of time.
“In the past, we’ve had the ability with very little difficulty to process a relatively small number of dubious signatures that we see in the ordinary course of processing of petitions,” Brater explained Thursday. “They’re scattered throughout the petitions, and we can look them up as we get to them. There was no possible way to do that approach here and get an accurate recommendation to the board.”
The state has identified 36 petition circulators who submitted fraudulent petition sheets consisting entirely of invalid signatures. Those circulators were named in a staff report, available here.
“The circulators here committed fraud,” Brater said. “They used the names of people who either weren’t registered, or they were registered and they forged their signatures. This is no mistake. These circulators knew they were doing this. They did this deliberately, and staff is confident in saying that these signatures should not be counted.”
But the candidates accused of having fraudulent signatures argued that they should not be held responsible for the errors. The candidates say they hired third parties to gather signatures for their petitions, and trusted all the signatures were all valid.
Brandenburg said that by throwing candidates off the ballot, the board of canvassers was disenfranchising thousands of valid petition signatures.
“I find this process to be an arbitrary goat rodeo,” Brandenburg said Thursday. “It’s a shame. It’s an assault against the American people on every single level.”
2. This law is at the center of the debate
The fate of the five disqualified governor candidates could come down to how the courts interpret a state law: MCL 168.544c.
The candidates argue the state mishandled their duties, since it only compared 7,000 signatures against the Qualified Voter File of the 68,000 signatures submitted by allegedly fraudulent circulators. In all cases, the state said the signatures from these circulators did not match the signatures on file.
The state invalidated all 68,000 signatures – across 10 sets of nominating petitions for candidates in varying races.
The candidates believe every single signature should have been checked against the Qualified Voter File.
MCL 168.544c, subsection 6 says, “The invalidity of 1 or more signatures on a petition does not affect the validity of the remainder of the signatures on the petition.” That’s the argument Johnson’s campaign has used.
Johnson only needs 1,200 more signatures to hit the required 15,000 to get on the ballot – he is the closest of the five candidates for governor disqualified. Nearly 7,000 of his signatures were tossed because they came from these allegedly fraudulent circulators.
Does Johnson’s campaign have a point about the law? Opponents say to keep reading beyond subsection 6.
Subsection 11a says, if the board finds that somebody signed a name other than theirs or made a false statement on a petition, it can “disqualify obviously fraudulent signatures on a petition form on which the violation … occurred, without checking the signatures against local registration records.”
This was the argument made by one of the challengers and Board of State Canvassers Vice Chair Mary Ellen Gurewitz.
“Therefore, we don’t have to look at every signature that those circulators have submitted,” Gurewitz said.
We’ll see if the courts agree.
3. Michigan gubernatorial race has been cut in half
Thursday’s ruling essentially cut the Republican gubernatorial race in half, and potentially eliminated the some of the top players in the game.
The disqualified candidates could still get back on the ballot through a lawsuit, but the timeline for that is tight with the June 3 ballot deadline looming.
In the meantime, the ruling has kicked out Craig and Johnson, who polled among the top five most popular candidates. Brandenburg, Markey Jr. and Brown were also kicked off the ballot Thursday.
Craig, Johnson and Markey all said they would challenge the decision in court and, in a social media post about the ruling, Brandenburg said “we are not done fighting.” Brown told reporters he will not fight the ruling.
Although nearly half of Michigan Republican voters have not yet decided who they will vote for in the primary election, recent polling has shown Craig, the former Detroit police chief, was leading the pack.
Craig was the only candidate with a double-digit lead in a poll conducted last month by the Detroit Regional Chamber, which ranked Craig as the preferred candidate with 23% support from respondents. The nine other gubernatorial candidates had 8% or less support from respondents. Johnson polled fifth with 5.2% support.
If Craig and Johnson are out of the race, that leaves candidates Garrett Soldano, Kevin Rinke and Ryan Kelley in the lead, according to polling. Ralph Rebandt and Tudor Dixon also are still in the race, and now could have a fighting chance with five competitors out of the way.
Dixon recently received the endorsement of the DeVos family, one of the most politically powerful families in Michigan. The endorsement could give her a well-needed boost in the race, as she has polled poorly in recent surveys.
In the meantime, the Detroit Regional Chamber has disinvited Craig and Johnson from a GOP gubernatorial debate planned during the 2022 Mackinac Policy Conference next week. They will be left off the debate roster unless their ballot status changes by 9 a.m. Thursday.
Dixon and Rebandt, who previously were not invited to the debate, have since been added to the roster.
RELATED: Michigan blocks 5 from GOP governor ballot – candidates promise lawsuits
4. Fraudulent signatures now in Attorney General’s hands
The suspected incidents of petition fraud are currently under review by Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, who could issue potential criminal charges after an investigation.
The issue centers around 36 petition circulators, who compiled an estimated 68,000 fraudulent signatures for 10 candidate campaigns including the five disqualified gubernatorial candidates: Craig, Johnson, Brown, Markey Jr. and Brandenburg.
The Bureau of Elections does not believe any of the candidates were aware of the fraudulent petition gathering. But their lack of quality control before submitting the petitions may result in their disqualification.
On Thursday, Board of State Canvassers Chair Norman Shinkle had harsh words for the petition circulators that allegedly submitted thousands of fraudulent signatures.
“My comments are that these people should all go to prison – the circulators that defrauded the candidates, and are defrauding us,” Shinkle said.
People who signed a petition with a name other than their own are guilty of a misdemeanor, with penalities of up to 93 days in jail and/or a $500 fine. It rises to a felony if somebody signs a petition with multiple names.
5. Bipartisan board was split on some votes
The four members of the state board voted together for many of the 32 cases considered on Thursday. But there were a handful of cases where the vote was split along party lines.
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers has a bipartisan split among its four members. Board Chair Norman Shinkle and member Tony Daunt are the board’s two Republicans, and Vice Chair Mary Ellen Gurewitz and member Jeannette Bradshaw are Democrats.
In cases where there was heavy signature fraud involved – like the five GOP gubernatorial cases – the votes were split along party lines, with the Democrats voting to disqualify the candidates from the ballot. Because the votes were a stalemate, those candidates were ultimately disqualified from the ballot.
The board was voting whether or not to accept reports by the Bureau of Elections on whether the petitions were sufficient enough to remain on the ballot. The default position was that the candidates were off the ballot unless voted back on by the board.
In order for a candidate to be added back to the ballot, at least three board members would have had to vote that their petition was sufficient.
In the cases of fraudulent gubernatorial petition signatures, the two Republicans voted against disqualifying the candidates from the ballot because they felt the decision should be left up to the courts.
“I’m not prepared to throw everybody off the ballot, myself,” Shinkle said.
There were also three 3-1 votes by the board. There were two cases where Shinkle voted not to disqualify judicial candidates Mark Koroi and Chastity Youngblood, and one where Bradshaw voted not to qualify gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon. The majority ruled in those three cases.
6. Board forced to make some tough calls
The laws of petition-gathering in Michigan are unforgiving, and that was proven this week with some of the tough calls the board had to make in several cases.
In order for a candidate to earn a place on any ballot, they have to circulate a petition and gather a specific number of valid signatures from registered voters in the correct jurisdiction, according to state law.
The rules are strict – candidates must ensure signatures are from valid, registered voters, and that every word of information on the petition is legible and correct.
In one case, a candidate for U.S. representative was booted from the ballot because she had stickers on the top of her petition that covered up parts of a few words, like “district,” “term of expiration date,” and “city or township.”
Elizabeth Ferszt said she used typed-out stickers to fill in the written portions of her petition because she was worried her own handwriting would be illegible. She argued that anyone who looked at her petitions could still make out what the stickers were covering, and that the petition was legible enough that people still understood what they were signing.
But even an error as seemingly harmless as that was still enough to have the candidate booted from the ballot.
“This brings me no pleasure, but the law states this – it’s past practice, it’s clear that things are covered up,” Daunt said, before making a motion to disqualify Ferszt from the ballot.
Board members characterized several of Thursday’s decisions as “gut-wrenching” and “brutal.” But, the board ruled, it is ultimately the candidate’s responsibility to ensure that everything is correct before they hand in a petition.
“I cannot stress hard enough having been in this position for a long time: take your time, make sure that everything is correct,” Bradshaw said.
-- MLive reporter Taylor DesOrmeau contributed to this report.
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