Great Lakes Wire

The Secure MI Vote petition drive, an election integrity initiative, is moving forward despite missing a June 1 deadline for submitting enough signed petitions to get the initiative on the fall ballot.

Spokesman for the group Jamie Roe told Great Lakes Wire that they believe they had enough valid signatures by the deadline, but news that five gubernatorial candidates in the Republican primary were knocked of the ballot for submitting fraudulently signed petitions had them reassessing their efforts. The candidates blamed paid circulators for the bad petitions. Secure MI Vote also relied in part on paid circulators.

“We believe we had in the range of 430,000 valid petitions (340,000 were needed), but plan is to get more of a cushion and now submit them by the end of the month,” Roe said.

Roe added that ballot approval wasn’t necessary for proposed initiatives, which include a popular voter ID provision, to become law. Under the state constitution, approval by state lawmakers was all they needed, he said.

“Our only concern is how long the Secretary of State (Democrat Jocelyn Benson) would take to verify the signatures,” Roe said.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, would have no veto power over the election reform initiatives if approved by the Legislature. Last October, she vetoed a package of election reform bills that were similar those in the Secure MI Vote reform package.

Besides the voter ID provision, the reforms would prohibit the Secretary of State from mass mailing absentee ballot applications, prohibit state and local election officials from accepting private funds to underwrite election management, and provide funding for the printing of ID cards, which would be free for those with no other valid ID.

In its signature drive, Secure MI Vote was also up against an alleged effort by an opposition group that paid circulators not to circulate petitions for election reform. The opposition, Groundgame Political Solutions, violated state law by failing to report the payments, according to an attorney representing one of the circulators.

“Section 43 of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act requires a ballot committee to report expenditures made by those working for it,” Troy Cumings, with the law firm of Warner Norcross & Judd, told Legal Newsline for an earlier story.

“Groundgame paid Dustin Wefel (Cumings’ client) and likely others to support its services to Protect MI Vote, including to refrain from obtaining signatures for the Secure MI Vote ballot committee. Yet neither Groundgame nor Protect MI Vote reported those payments. Section 43 of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act specifically prohibits a committee like Protect MI Vote from hiding its expenditures like this through a consultant.”

Cumings told Great Lakes Wire that there were no new developments in the case -- that “the complaint was still in process.”