Five Republican candidates for governor will be kept off the ballot, but the issue is headed to the courts.
James Craig, Perry Johnson, Donna Brandenburg, Michael Markey Jr. and Michael Brown were deemed to have too few valid signatures to qualify for the ballot, as they submitted thousands of fraudulent signatures.
The Board of State Canvassers deadlocked 2-2 along party lines at its Thursday, May 26, meeting to consider who to add to the ballot. Because of the stalemate, the board did not accept the staff report that the five candidates petitions are insufficient. However, an affirmative majority vote is needed to add names to the ballot.
Chairman Norman Shinkle, a Republican, was one of the votes against deeming the signatures insufficient. He said the matter should probably be decided by the courts.
“I’m not prepared to throw everybody off the ballot, myself,” Shinkle said.
The board did approve five Republicans running for governor to make the ballot: Kevin Rinke, Garrett Soldano, Ryan Kelley, Ralph Rebandt and Tudor Dixon.
Dixon’s signatures were challenged, but only because she had the wrong term expiration date on the petitions. But the state said that is not a required field and not a cause for disqualification, so the board voted to add her to the ballot.
Johnson’s attorney and Markey both promised they will take the issue to court. As did Craig, in a statement shared with MLive after the board’s decision Thursday, promising his campaign will file “an immediate appeal in the courts.”
“We are confident that when the law is justly applied, our campaign will be on the ballot this August,” Craig said in the statement.
The timeline is tight. The state needs to have the ballots finalized by June 3 so that absentee ballots can be printed and proofread, said Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater. Ballots get sent to military and overseas voters on June 18, and to all other absentee voters starting June 23.
Brown withdrew from the race this week, upon news of his fraudulent signatures. Even if Brown’s signatures are deemed valid, he said he is staying out of the race.
Investigators found 36 petition circulators for 10 different candidates – in varying races – committed intentional forgery, signing random names on the petition sheets. The candidates did not catch the fraud and submitted them.
The 36 circulators submitted an estimated 68,000 forged signatures, per the state.
The debate came down to an interpretation of a state law, MCL 168.544c, because how the Michigan Bureau of Elections officials handled the petitions.
While they reviewed every single signature, they only double checked 7,000 of the 68,000 signatures by comparing them to peoples’ actual signatures on file in Michigan’s Qualified Voter File. None were correct.
But the candidates argue the state needs to review all 68,000 signatures – and not throw away signatures just because they came from a fraudulent circulator – as MCL 168.544c states.
“The invalidity of 1 or more signatures on a petition does not affect the validity of the remainder of the signatures on the petition,” the law states.
But the law also says signatures can be disqualified without checking them against the Qualified Voter File if there’s evidence that a false statement was made on a petition.
Johnson is the closest of the five candidates to having the required 15,000 valid signatures, with 13,800 valid signatures and 9,393 invalid ones. Nearly 7,000 of the invalid ones were because of the fraudulent circulators.
So Johnson only needs to find 1,200 good signatures among the batch of invalid signatures. His attorney presented one example of a signature that should be deemed valid at Thursday’s meeting.
Craig, Markey, Brandenburg and Brown were at least 3,800 valid signatures short of the requirement.
The 36 circulators could face criminal charges, as the Michigan Department of State has referred the issue to Attorney General Dana Nessel for investigation. Shinkle said Thursday he thinks those circulators should go to prison.
Johnson and Craig – two of the front-runners in the race – didn’t argue their case, but had attorneys at the meeting for them. Brandenburg and Markey both argued their case alongside their attorneys.
Brandenburg called the state’s process a “shame” and “an assault against the American people on every single level.” She also said she submitted thousands more signatures than the state claims.
“I find this process to be an arbitrary goat rodeo,” Brandenburg said.
Markey said he shouldn’t be associated with the other candidates, since he used a different company to collect his signatures. The Grand Haven financial adviser said these are serious allegations against him, and the process shouldn’t be left to assuming some signatures are invalid.
“You associated me with fraud. That’s a really, really big accusation that I think you guys took lightly,” Markey said. “That’s huge on my career. This is why normal people do not run.”
Markey compared the situation to Jose Canseco’s, the former baseball player who hit 462 career home runs, but his reputation is clouded by his admitted use of performance-enhancing steroids. Just because Canseco took steroids doesn’t mean every home run he hit was because of steroids, Markey said.
Markey asserts the state didn’t have the time to look through his signatures, and wrongly lumped him with the other candidates who “cut corners.”
“I just don’t think they had the time,” Markey said. “I think they got to ours and just said, ‘You know what, all these other players weren’t doing a good job, so he must be part of this group.’ We were not.”
The Michigan Republican Party argues all five candidates should be allowed on the ballot because of the state’s process.
“You cannot change the rules midway through the game,” said MIGOP Chief of Staff Paul Cordes during public comment. “I don’t refute that systematic fraud occurred, but both the law and ... (state) guidance on evaluating signatures prohibits the wholesale rejection of pages of petitions and tens of thousands of signatures without any review. The opposite was done here.”
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