LANSING, Mich. — The Fair Election Fund today filed an amicus brief in the Michigan Supreme Court asking the Court to apply to the citizen voting petition the same principle it applied when it protected two other petitions from disqualification in 2022.
The brief takes no position on the merits of the proposed amendment.
In 2022, the Court twice declined to let a procedural technicality keep a petition off the ballot. One of those petitions belonged to Promote the Vote, which is now on the other side of this case. The Fair Election Fund’s position is that a principle protecting one petition but not the next is not a principle at all, and that the Court should consistently applies rules and the law.
709,841 Michigan residents signed the petition. The Bureau of Elections examined 1,000 of those signatures, roughly fourteen hundredths of one percent, and projected the petition at 97.4 percent of the signatures required — a result inside the Bureau’s own stated margin of error. The Board of State Canvassers deadlocked and declined to certify, leaving the petition three signatures short in a sample of one thousand.
The brief argues that a result this close should not be treated as final without a confirmatory step. For example, California requires a full check of every signature filed when a sample projects results in this range. Colorado requires a line by line count. Michigan itself built additional verification into its process until it scaled those safeguards back in 2023.
The brief also addresses the Board’s rejection of sworn statements from individual voters. Voters whose signatures had been questioned based upon the secret database submitted notarized affidavits confirming the signatures were their own. The Board refused to defer to the sworn affidavits. The Fair Election Fund’s view is that setting aside sworn testimony, verified by a notary, on the basis of secret handwriting analysis is a significant step and inappropriate for the Board.
The Fair Election Fund recently published a series of state by state reports evaluating how state election officials administer elections, using a framework drawn from the recommendations of the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission. In April of 2025, it issued findings critical of Michigan’s election administration. Its interest in this case is the process rather than the proposal, and its criticism of how Michigan runs its elections has never depended on which party or which initiative stood to benefit.
The Fair Election Fund is a watchdog group that was formed to shine a light on fraud and abuse still occurring in our election system.