Michigan Republicans Reaaaaally Don't Want You To Vote On Abortion, Voting Rights

Bad for goose, bad for Michigander.

If there is one human characteristic that nearly everyone is charmed by, it is the propensity to publicly point out the typos and grammatical or spelling errors of others. It's even better if one can do this in a Frasier Crane voice while sipping a glass of sherry. This is what Michigan Republicans are counting on, anyway, in their challenges to two very popular ballot measures addressing abortion and voting rights.

When it was turned in back in July, the petition to get the Reproductive Freedom for All Act (RFFA) on the ballot had garnered a record-breaking 753,759 signatures — more than any Michigan ballot initiative in history and over 300,000 more than the number that was needed. The Promote the Vote 2022 initiative, meant to protect voting rights across the state, also managed a rather impressive 670,000 signatures.

This Thursday was the last day to challenge the validity of these measures before they make it onto the ballot, and some rightwing groups in Michigan are hoping their last ditch efforts can keep them off.

A group calling itself Citizens Supporting Michigan Women and Children filed a last minute challenge to the RFFS on the grounds that a bunch of typos in the petition should render it invalid, claiming that the "strings of gibberish" made it so people didn't know what they were signing, despite the fact that it was otherwise very clear what they were signing.

When the petition was first approved in March, it was approved by the Board of Canvassers on the condition that an extra "the" be removed from a header. The deletion of the "the" resulted in a strange typographic mess in which the spaces between several words were accidentally eliminated.

For example, one portion of the text read “DECISIONSABOUTALLMATTERSRELATINGTOPREGNANCY” instead of “DECISIONS ABOUT ALL MATTERS RELATING TO PREGNANCY.” You can see what they're talking about in the picture below.

It's really not the kind of thing that would prevent anyone from knowing what it is that they are signing — an amendment to keep the state from interfering in the personal reproductive decisions of its citizens. Spacing of words is also not expressly addressed in the statute on ballot requirements in the Michigan Constitution. Election lawyer Mark Brewer, who previously represented the RFFA coalition, told the Michigan Advance that typos of this kind are actually quite common in the Michigan Constitution, including in the amendment that raised the state's drinking age to 21.

University of Michigan professor of constitutional law Richard Primus told the Washington Post that these typos should not be enough to delegitimize the amendment and that there should be no issue with editing the spaces back into it.

“There’s no reason to think that anyone didn’t understand what the petition was saying,” Primus said. “There have been typographical problems with things drafted for constitutions as long as there have been constitutions in the United States.”

After citizens in Kansas — one of the reddest states in the union and the site of the 1991 so-called "Summer of Mercy" that galvanized the forced birth movement —voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion legal, Republicans are a getting a tad nervous about putting abortion rights on the ballot. Michigan is one of four states with abortion on an upcoming ballot this year, the others being California, Vermont and Kentucky.

Speaking of voting, there is also that challenge to the voting rights and access bill Promote the Vote 2022 from a group calling itself Defend Your Vote (presumably from other people who might try to vote). The challenge from Defend Your Vote alleges that the Promote the Vote petition “fails to identify the inherent conflict between its wording and our current constitution” and fails to tell people that the amendment would bar the legislature from controlling elections and barring certain people from voting, which it does not appear to do.

This is what it does say:

Constitutional amendment to: recognize fundamental right to vote without harassing conduct; require military or overseas ballots be counted if postmarked by election day; provide voter right to verify identity with photo ID or signed statement; provide voter right to single application to vote absentee in all elections; require state-funded postage for absentee applications and ballots; require state-funded absentee-ballot drop boxes; provide that only election officials may conduct post-election audits; require 9 days of early in-person voting: allow donations to fund elections, which must be disclosed; require canvass boards to certify election results based only on the official records of votes cast.

“This bogus, baseless and meritless complaint shows the lengths that special interests will go to rig our elections by making voting more difficult and less accessible for people across Michigan,” said Micheal Davis, executive director of Promote the Vote told the Michigan Advance. 

“Promote the Vote 2022 turned in nearly 670,000 signatures from voters across our state because they want safe and secure elections and to protect the right of every eligible citizen to vote. We are confident that Promote the Vote 2022 will appear on the November ballot and that the people of Michigan, not special interests or politicians, will decide.”

Notably, another ballot measure, the GOP-backed Secure MI Vote, which would have instituted Voter ID, prohibited donations to fund elections, and prohibited election officials from making absentee ballots available except upon request, failed to get enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

 Michigan is 47 percent Democratic, 34 percent Republican, and 19 percent independent. Fifty-eight percent of Michigan voters disapproved of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in this recent poll. (Also, good news as usual for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: Abortion is now the most important issue to Michigan voters in the governor's race!) Fifty-one percent of Michiganders believe that it should be easier to vote, and only 24 percent want to make it harder. Most of the measures proposed in the Promote The Vote amendment have wide margins of support in the state.

However, Michigan has been gerrymandered within an inch of its life by Republicans who have controlled the election maps for the last two decades, which gives them a massive advantage in the state Legislature . This means that while Republicans who want to bar abortion in the state hold a majority in the Lege, popular votes on abortion and voting rights are not likely to go their way.

Republicans have created a nationwide mirage of widespread support for their policies pretty much exclusively through geographic chicanery, and Michigan Republicans are now seeking to maintain that mirage by hoping that their petty challenges to these initiatives can keep them off of the ballot entirely. Clearly, if they really thought Michiganders didn't want reproductive rights and voting rights, they'd be keeping their mouths shut right about now.

[ Michigan Advance ]

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