Great Lakes Wire

Yesterday’s voter approval of a constitutional amendment, Prop 2, that makes numerous changes to state election laws is a “disaster for election integrity in Michigan,” says Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

One provision in the amendment, von Spakovsky told Great Lakes Wire, guts voter ID requirements – popular among voters according to an August 2021 poll – by allowing prospective voters to sign a form saying that they are who they claim they are.

He calls the provision “reckless” along with another that allows elections officials to accept funds from private donors.

“It opens the door for political donors to influence how elections are administered in order to benefit their favored candidates,” he said.

A third provision in the amendment would create permanent absentee ballot lists.

“This will ensure that ballots will go to voters who are deceased or have moved out of state,” he said. “This is a particular problem in Michigan given that the secretary of state has been sued over her refusal to take deceased voters off the state’s registration list.”

Last November, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for failing to remove over 25,000 deceased registrations from the voter rolls. This past August, federal judge Jane Beckering, a Biden appointee, dismissed Benson’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The PILF alleges in its lawsuit that the state is in violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 that requires officials to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”

The provision in the amendment allowing election officials to accept private funding runs contrary to actions in 24 states and 12 counties that have banned, or restricted, the private money since the 2020 general election. Leading up to that election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated close to $400 million to two nonprofits, the Center for Tech & Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation & Research. The groups then granted the money to local and state elections officials under the guise of supporting safe elections during the pandemic. Research from the Capital Research Center shows that money was actually used to fund a get out the vote drive for the Democratic Party.

Approval of Proposition 2 was a big blow to a competing amendment proposal, backed by Secure MI Vote, that would have enacted a stricter voter ID requirement than current law, prohibit the secretary of state’s office from mass mailing absentee ballots, and provide for the funding of ID cards for those with no valid ID.

The Secure MI Vote proposal was not on the ballot, but was awaiting approval from the Legislature once its petition signatures were cleared by the Michigan Bureau of Elections. It is now dead with the approval of Proposition 2.