Senate Committee plows through packed agenda on petition reforms and incarcerated
Read the full article on the Michigan Advance website here.
By Kyle Davidson - December 5, 2024
Despite the crowded 11-bill agenda at Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Elections and Ethics committee, members made short work of the legislation before them, voting along party lines to return each bill to the Senate floor.
Over the course of its less-than-an-hour long meeting, the committee considered legislation addressing prison gerrymandering, requirements on informing recently-released prisoners on the state’s voting processes, and several efforts aimed at improving Michigan’s petition circulation and ballot initiative process.
The meeting opened by considering legislation from state Sen. Sylvia Santana (D-Detroit), which would require the Michigan Department of Corrections to collect a newly incarcerated person’s pre-incarceration address and require the state’s independent redistricting commission to take the results into consideration while proposing a redistricting plan.
Santana’s Senate Bill 494 was referred back to the Senate floor in a 5-1 vote with Sen. Ruth Johnson (R-Holly), who previously served as Secretary of State, serving as the sole vote in opposition, with her fellow Republican committee member Sen. Ed McBroom (R-Vulcan) absent from the meeting.
Members also considered Sen. Stephanie Chang’s (D-Detroit) Senate Bill 835, which would require the Michigan Department of Corrections to provide prisoners with information about Michigan’s voter registration and election processes. This would include a written document from the Michigan Secretary of State noting that Michigan election law does not prohibit an individual from voting once that person is no longer in prison, which Chang said would help combat misinformation that formerly incarcerated individuals cannot vote.
“This document will be put into each individual’s release day packet, so as people are leaving prison, whether they’re leaving on parole or maximum discharge, they get a packet of information. The document itself is not specific to the individual,” said Kyle Kaminski, the legislative liaison for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
“If, for some reason, that release did not happen as expected, then the packet simply isn’t provided to the person, and it would be provided at a future date. So for us, it’s not any additional work to be ready to do this. It’s a very common thing for us to provide all that information at the time of release,” Kaminski said.
After hearing testimony on the bill, the committee voted to return the bill to the Senate floor for further consideration, with Johnson serving as the sole vote in opposition.
On its third order of business, the committee heard testimony on a slate of three bills from the committee’s chair, Sen. Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield), and Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), seeking to address deceptive practices in the petitioning process.
Moss’s Senate Bill 1108 would ban the payment of petition circulators by the signature, removing incentives for circulators to use deceptive means to gather more signatures. Several other states have already banned this practice, Moss noted, including Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
Senate Bill 1109 would require petition circulators to direct potential signers to the summary of the petition prior to accepting their signature.
“A ballot proposal should be able to stand on its own merit instead of making up a misleading description or other deceptive tactics to gain support,” Moss said.
If a circulator does not comply, the sponsor of the petition would face a fine of $1,500 or $50 per violation, whichever is greater, Moss said, holding petition sponsors responsible for appropriate training, oversight and monitoring of paid or volunteer circulators.
Irwin’s Senate Bill 1110 would change the state’s election law to address duplicate signatures on a petition, or a candidates nominating or qualifying petition, allowing the first valid signature to be counted toward the petition’s signature requirements rather than the current practice of eliminating duplicate signatures.
“Here is a citizen who signed a petition maybe twice, and they clearly want this issue to come before the voters. But for reasons that are, as far as I can tell, purely administrative, a decision was made decades ago by us, long ago Secretary of State, that if there are duplicate signatures on a petition, we just eliminate all of them and we erase that citizen’s voice from the process,” Irwin said.
After taking questions and hearing supportive testimony on the package from the Michigan Department of State, the committee’s members, save for Johnson, voted to report the bills back to the Senate floor.
For the final item of the agenda, the committee heard testimony from House Elections Committee Chair Penelope Tsernoglou (D-East Lansing) on a package of bills looking to reform the state’s ballot initiative process.
Modeled off of several recommendations from the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, the bills aim to bring the board’s current practices into state law and ensure state election law is clear on the requirements of the petition process, Tsernoglou said. They also aim to reduce an increased burden on the Michigan Bureau of Elections, with signature requirements for petitions increasing alongside voter turnout, without providing the bureau with any additional time to process these signatures.
Additionally, more than 70,000 fraudulent signatures were submitted across 10 campaigns in 2022, resulting in five Republican candidates for governor being disqualified from the ballot. This created an additional burden for both the bureau of elections and the board of state canvassers, neither of which had a procedure in place to address the unprecedented situation, Tsernoglou said.
“The procedure utilized by the bureau was ultimately upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court, and thus we would like to codify the process,” she said.
House Bills 5571–5576 make it clear that the board of state canvassers is authorized to use statistical random sampling in canvassing petitions, clarifies the board’s authority to disqualify obviously fraudulent signatures and refer them to the Michigan Attorney General for investigation. They also remove references regarding how the secretary of state must communicate with the board of state canvassers, and how they must announce that the board has declared a petition as sufficient, Tsernoglou said.
Additionally the legislation removes language that requires an individual to sign a sworn affidavit if they are a paid signature gatherer and requires that petitioner must state in writing that they made a good faith effort to sort signatures and that they are submitting at least the minimum number of required signatures.
Mary Ellen Gurewitz, the Democratic chair of the board of state canvassers also testified, noting that the package would also shift the way the board reviews petitions, moving away from a standard of strict compliance with laws on petition formatting to a substantial compliance standard.
“A court decision in 2012 said that petitions had to strictly comply, and that requirement has required the board of canvassers on quite a number of occasions to reject petitions which had really minimal and not material errors,” Gurewitz said.
“For example, cutting off on a petition a couple of words on the circulator certificate, or cutting the margin short so that people who went to a great deal of difficulty and trouble collecting signatures were rejected because we were forced to apply a standard which everyone applying that standard thought was unfair and unnecessary,” she said.
The bills also received supportive testimony from Promote the Vote, which backed successful ballot proposals to expand voting rights in 2018 and 2022. kyle
After members voted along party lines to send all six bills to the Senate floor for further consideration, the committee adjourned.
