LANSING, Mich. — The Michigan Board of State Canvassers is contemplating changes to the state’s rules regarding the review of voter signatures for changing state laws, amending the constitution or a candidate seeking to get on the ballot after a year of record demands on the Bureau of Elections.
The changes proposed by state elections director Jonathan Brater seek to speed up the time-intensive process of reviewing hundreds of thousands of signatures for validity and sufficiency in order to allow more time for consideration by the board, challenges to state determinations and potential litigation related to the acceptance or rejection of a petition.
“That process right now is extremely compressed and nobody’s happy with it,” Brater said. He added that the current signature-sampling process the board uses was largely developed in the 1970s and ’80s and utilizes a computer software that will not longer be functional for producing a random sample of signatures.
The suggested changes come after the bureau reviewed hundreds of thousands of signatures related to three ballot proposals last year and weeded out five Republican gubernatorial candidates whose signatures contained unprecedented levels of fraud.
State elections director Jonathan Brater, left, says Michigan needs to modernize its methods of analyzing voter signatures for petitions to change laws and amend the state constitution.
Among the largest changes proposed by the Bureau of Elections are the elimination of face review requirements for petition sheets prior to random sampling, the abandonment of the “shuffling” of documents prior to the random sample and the end of a two-phase review that currently requires more signatures to be sampled if the initial 500 signature review is considered inconclusive. Instead, the initial selection would encompass 1,000 signatures for statewide ballot initiatives and 750 signatures for statewide candidate petitions, allowing for a smaller margin of error on the first sampling.
For the 2024 election, groups have to collect a minimum of 356,958 valid signatures for voter-initiated laws, 446,198 to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot and 223,099 for referendums of existing laws, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The elimination of the face review — what appears to be the greatest timesaver for the bureau — would eliminate the bureau’s current process of examining each petition page for obvious defects so those pages aren’t include in the universe of petition pages sampled for signatures. The face review usually takes up about two-thirds of the time allotted the bureau for review of signatures, Brater said.
Experts told canvassers Monday that the inclusion of sheets that would usually be weeded out during a face review wouldn’t make a difference statistically since they’d have equal chances of being caught in a random sampling.
“You ultimately get to the same spot,” said Stephen Blann, a principal with the CPA firm Rehmann.
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers is considering changes to the state’s rules regarding the review of voter signatures for changing state laws, amending the constitution or a candidate seeking to get on the ballot.
Canvassers questioned the elimination of the face review and the impact it might have on the bureau’s ability to catch widespread problems with signatures, pointing to the aid a face review provided last year in determining signatures for five Republican gubernatorial candidates were rife with forgery.
“What we saw this past year was a very significant degree of forgery and it wasn’t homogenous,” said Canvasser Mary Ellen Gurewitz. “It’s really hard for me to think about how the fraudulent signatures would be randomly distributed. I don’t think they were.
“It’s hard for me to see how that level of fraud would have been uncovered through random sampling.”
Canvasser Tony Daunt questioned the legal ramifications of the board’s changes to petition signature review rules, noting the group had been the subject of frequent litigation based on its past rule interpretations.
“What is the likelihood that we’re going to get sued when we bounce somebody as a result of these changes?” Daunt said. “I think the answer is 100%.”
Blann stood by the statistics showing a negligible effect on the ultimate outcome of the petition with or without a face review.
Brater acknowledged the board would need more time to process the proposed changes, but asked the members to make a decision on them in a timely manner.
“There is not an immediately emergency time pressure factor here,” Brater said. “But it would be great if we could have these procedures in place before we get a petition for this cycle.”
Other changes to the process that canvassers approved Monday included coding changes regarding the assessment and labeling of errors in the signature sample.