In this presidential election year, many of the election-related debates are focused on the candidates for the country’s top office. In Michigan, however, there has been an important debate about the signature-gathering requirements for getting petitions on the ballot.
In June, the governor signed a bill amending the Michigan Election Law to disallow any petition signatures made prior to 180 days before the petition was filed with the Secretary of State. Before this amendment, the statute had said that signatures made more than 180 days before filing were rebuttably presumed to be stale and void. So, even though the 180-day requirement hasn’t changed, the amendment has removed any possibility of petition backers’ curing the staleness problem. (The Legislative Analysis of that bill is here.)
Not that petition backers were routinely able to rebut the 180-day presumption. The Board of Canvassers had required groups to get, for every signature older than 180 days, affidavits from the petition signer or local clerk stating that the signer was registered to vote on the date of signing and during the 180-day window.
This year, legislative initiative petitions were required to collect 252,523 signatures to get on the ballot. Two groups—one seeking to legalize and tax marijuana and another seeking to ban fracking—realized that they were not going to meet that number within the 180 days and asked the Board of Canvassers to allow them to validate older signatures using an electronic database that the state maintains to track changes to the state’s registered voters. The Board of Canvassers deadlocked on this proposal.
The statutory amendment came on the heels of that deadlock. Governor Snyder defended signing the bill by stating that the time limits help ensure that “the issues that make the ballot are the ones that matter most to Michiganders.” The backers of the marijuana petition claim that the 180-day limit effectively shuts out grassroots groups from the legislative initiative petition process. As it stands, it seems that neither the marijuana legalization petition nor the antifracking petition will be on the ballot come November. In June, MI Legalize brought a suit in the Court of Claims challenging the “stale” signature requirement as unconstitutional. Whether the court agrees with that challenge remains to be seen, but the group's critiques of the requirement raise important questions about access to the process.