When Tudor Dixon won the Republican nomination to challenge Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, she did so in a field of candidates cut in half after the state’s handling of alleged fraud deprived primary voters of some of their top choices.

Five Republican candidates failed to qualify for the ballot after the Bureau of Elections removed thousands of unverified but allegedly fraudulent signatures from their nominating petitions. Since the candidates had no opportunity to collect additional signatures, this spelled death for their campaigns. If Michiganders don’t want fraudsters picking their future candidates, they need to fix their laws. 

To qualify for the primary ballot, a gubernatorial candidate must submit a nominating petition with at least 15,000 valid signatures of Michigan voters. Petition circulators — sometimes contracted, sometimes volunteers — collect signatures on sheets, which the candidate gives to the Bureau of Elections. 

The bureau looks over each signature for obvious problems. Unless a whole sheet is invalid — for example, if the circulator did not sign to certify it — suspect signatures can only be discarded after they are compared to the Qualified Voter File, a statewide database of information on registered voters. 

In the recent Republican primary, the bureau discarded tens of thousands of signatures from allegedly fraudulent circulators without checking them against the QVF. Five Republican gubernatorial candidates ended up below the 15,000-signature threshold, and the bureau recommended the Board of Canvassers not certify them to the ballot. 

It was past the deadline to submit signatures when the candidates were informed they failed to qualify and only a few days before the hearing where they could appeal to the Board of Canvassers.

One candidate, Michael Brown, chose to withdraw. Brown told The Collegian he “was not going to be associated with any fraud,” although he believed the signatures collected for his campaign were valid. The other four appealed to the Board of Canvassers.

Michael Markey Jr. told The Collegian he appealed not just for his campaign but for “election integrity and process.” He said the Bureau’s procedure leaves campaigns, especially grassroots campaigns, vulnerable to sabotage. 

The appeals failed, and the board upheld the bureau’s recommendation 2-2. It was argued at the hearing that candidates were responsible for verifying signatures they turned in, which would mean checking the signer’s name, registration status, address, city or township, zip code, and signature. All but the signature can be checked against publicly accessible portions of the QVF. 

Jonathan Brater, the director of the Bureau of Elections, said during the hearing that candidates can ask a local clerk’s office to see the signature on voter’s registration. He later said in an affidavit that, “Although the digital image of the voter’s signature in the QVF cannot be disclosed … clerks maintain other records that include voter signatures which can be disclosed, including voter registration forms…”

Attorney Eric Doster argued at the hearing that clerks’ offices do not allow candidates to see signatures. 

Calls to 41 local clerks’ offices suggest Doster was at least partly correct. Five offices said they would not allow a candidate to see the signature on the registration. Two of these said they could check the signature themselves, but not one office said they would show the signature to the candidate. Six said they did not know or would need to check first. Others were unavailable or referred the question to another office or official. 

Even if candidates could obtain the information, it would be an enormous task. Verifying the signatures would have meant finding out which of the more than 1,000 local clerks’ offices in Michigan had each signer’s voter registration, asking those offices for the registration record for each signer, and comparing each person’s signature on the petition to their signature on their registration. Even checking a fraction of the signatures this way could be a significant undertaking. 

Making the signatures in the QVF public record would solve the problem, but it would also be a forger’s dream. A more realistic solution is to give the candidates a reasonable window of time after the bureau checks the signatures to make up the difference if signatures are found to be invalid. 

This would leave signature verification to an entity with full access to the QVF while keeping the burden on candidates to submit enough valid signatures. It would also drastically reduce the ability of signature collecting companies to cheat candidates out of a place on the ballot and Michiganders out of their choices.