Two ballot initiatives in Michigan have secured enough petition signatures to qualify for November’s ballot, according to the state’s Bureau of Elections. Nonetheless, the sponsors of both—one to establish abortion rights and one to protect voting rights—are going to have to appeal to the state’s Supreme Court to actually appear on the ballot. That’s because the two Republicans on the Board of State Canvassers rejected democracy Wednesday and blocked the measures, a chilling preview of Republican intentions for 2024.
The four-person canvassing board, two Democrats and two Republicans, deadlocked on both. The abortion initiative would negate a 1931 state law that bans all abortions except those that would save the life of the mother. Forced birth proponents hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court’s overthrow of federal abortion rights would trigger that law back into force, but state courts have blocked its enforcement, citing the pending ballot initiative.
Reproductive Freedom for All, the group backing the measure, secured a record number of signatures to get it on the ballot—they needed 425,059 and got well over 730,000. The forced birth challengers to the initiative claimed that the petition wasn’t valid because one version of the form circulated had missing spaces and an extraneous word. The Republican canvassers seized on that technicality to reject the petition.
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“We had more than 730,000 people who read, signed and understood what they signed,” Darci McConnell, a spokeswoman for Reproductive Freedom for All, said following the deadlocked vote. “The board was supposed to do one thing today and affirm that we had the signatures, their own bureau said we did. So we’re still optimistic that we’ll be on the ballot in November” after a legal appeal, she added.
The Republican canvassers used a similar argument to block the voting rights expansion initiative Wednesday. The petition circulated by Promote the Vote, the voting rights advocacy group, didn’t list every section of the state constitution that would be affected by the proposal. The initiative language had been approved by the elections board before it was circulated and, like the abortion initiative, gained a few hundred thousand more signatures than necessary.
It would establish nine days of early voting in the state; require 24-hour ballot drop boxes in every municipality; require state-funded, prepaid postage for absentee ballot applications and those ballots; and allow voters to choose to vote by absentee ballot for all future elections. The state currently doesn’t have early voting beyond some absentee voting. The initiative also addresses Trump’s attempted 2020 coup, adding language to the state constitution that explicitly says election outcomes “shall be determined solely by the vote of electors casting ballots in the election.”
One battleground state—Arizona—has already seen an election protection initiative fail. The state Supreme Court, packed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey with the help of the legislature and that added two seats in 2016, invalidated the Free and Fair Elections Act measure by rejecting over half the signatures to conveniently leave it just 0.6% short of what it needed to qualify. With that measure kept off the ballot by Republicans, the fight turns to defeating three constitutional amendments Republicans have put on the ballot to further erode voting rights.
What these moves by Republicans prove is that democracy is on the ballot in every state this midterm cycle. They will do anything and everything in their power to subvert the will of the people.
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