The Michigan Board of State Canvassers must conduct an investigation into the signatures of petition circulators for independent presidential candidate Cornel West, although his status as being certified for the ballot remains intact.
That was the unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals (COA) to a request seeking to overturn a decision by the canvassing board on Monday that approved the petitions filed by West’s campaign to appear on the Nov. 5 ballot.
“We do not overturn the Board’s decision that West’s petitions were sufficient for him to be certified for inclusion on the ballot,” stated the opinion. “Rather, we hold that the Board is required to perform an investigation into the genuineness of the challenged circulator signatures, and we leave all of the details concerning that investigation to the sound judgment and expertise of the involved staff, Board members, and officers.”
Elections attorney Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, filed the appeal after alleging that West’s petition’s were “rife with fraud,” including that nearly 50 of his campaign’s circulators “forged or permitted the forgery of at least 18,775 signatures through ‘round-robining’ and other means.”
Round-robining is a process by which multiple people pass around petition sheets with each person signing on a line using handwriting different from the circulator’s so that the signatures appear to have come from actual voters.
The COA ruled that while the canvassing board does have a clear legal duty to commence an investigation, the Legislature has also afforded it “considerable discretion” in how it conducts that investigation, what sanctions it wishes to impose, if any, and freed it from any particular deadline.
The COA on Friday also ruled West’s name could not be disqualified from the ballot based on errors in his affidavit of identity (AOI) as presidential candidates seeking to run without party affiliation were not obligated to file an AOI.
Brewer earlier indicated he plans to appeal both decisions to the Michigan Supreme Court.
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Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.
This article was originally published on Michigan Advance and republished here, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.
