Michigan’s ‘money out of politics’ group confident in signature validity as it faces new challenge

Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers plan to take up the Michiganders for Money Out Of Politics petition next week, assessing both the sufficiency of its signatures collected over the last year, as well as a direct challenge to those signatures.

The board will meet to review the petitions on Friday, July 24, after it approved the initiative for collection in August 2025. Organizers for the initiative turned in their signature petitions to the Michigan Bureau of Elections in late May, amassing more than 562,000 signatures. The group only needs to submit at least 356,958 valid signatures — 8% of the votes cast for governor in 2022 — in order to qualify for the November ballot.

Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, which aims to ban utility companies and government contractors from making campaign contributions, has touted that its effort was mostly volunteer-based and that it only used paid signature collectors within the last few months. That, by proxy, should help the initiative avoid the hangups that past initiatives or candidates have run into when they hire paid signature collectors.

Of note, the 2022 Republican gubernatorial slate was rocked when half of its primary candidates were booted from the ballot because they used the same paid-signature collection firm, and that firm was found to have fraudulently added signatures to petitions on voters’ behalf.

In opposition to Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, a group known as Protect MI Free Speech has filed a direct challenge to the petition initiative’s efforts, claiming that a 1,000-signature sample of its collected signatures did not contain the requisite number of valid signatures and should not be certified by the state’s canvassers.

John Sellek, of Harbor Strategic, is the spokesperson for the opposition group, which has claimed the signatures contain patterns of possible forgery and fraud, inaccurate and incomplete signatures and should not be certified. Selleck also raised the spectre of the 2022 GOP gubernatorial signature scandal.

“Before the free speech rights of everyday Michigan families are wiped out by this trojan horse, dark money-funded initiative that will put out-of-state billionaires in control of our state politics, the Board of Canvassers must conduct a thorough investigation into the apparent submission of invalid signatures, including signatures from dead people,” Sellek said in a news release when the challenge was filed on Friday, July 10. “Michigan residents already lived through a disastrous petition process in the last gubernatorial election year, when the rules were ignored and the process was corrupted by bad actors. We strongly encourage the canvassers to fully investigate the sample and the full submission.”

In an interview with Michigan Advance, Sean McBrearty, co-chair of the Michiganders for Money Out of Politics executive board, said he was confident that the state’s canvassers will approve the initiative and that the group will surmount the challenge.

“This initiative is about all of us in Michigan taking our power back from the corporations who have bought too much power in our political system,” McBrearty said. “A large part of this was a volunteer operation, and that was really important. When it comes to the paid signatures that we were doing in the last couple months, we did extensive quality control.”

McBrearty said that involved matching signatures against the state’s voter file, checking to make sure that everything that they turned in was on the up-and-up, and having 50 to 100 volunteers doing hard looks at the petitions at a quality control center for days.

He added that volunteer-based signature drives typically have a higher rate of cleaner signatures, putting McBrearty at ease over the challenge by Protect MI Free Speech.

“We’re very confident in getting the Board of Canvassers approval,” McBrearty said. “This is just the easiest, cheapest way for them to try and knock us off track, but it’s not going to work. We put in the work over the weekend to make a really great rebuttal.”

Part of that rebuttal argues the initiative has a substantial valid signature cushion compared to what the initiative needs to be approved, as the group submitted more than 200,000 signatures above the qualifying threshold. That’s a margin of 57%, the group said.

The opposition group claims that there was no way those gatherers could have collected valid signatures from that many households in a neighborhood. The rebuttal filed with the canvassers last week, however, calls the claims of fraud unfounded, as its volunteers, in many cases, were well-trained door-to-door canvassers. 

“They are throwing everything against the wall that they can to try to keep us off the ballot now because it’s going to be cheaper to do it now than if they’re going to have to fight us at the ballot box,” McBrearty said. “They really made all these frivolous arguments … accusing a whole bunch of people of fraud because they actually just did their jobs really well. We expected them to do this.”