A campaign to tighten Michigan’s voter ID laws submitted signatures Wednesday in hopes of getting a proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot.
The measure, from the group Americans for Citizen Voting, would require all Michiganders to show proof of citizenship while registering to vote. The current system has registrants check a box affirming citizenship. Making a false affirmation carries the threat of a felony perjury charge.
The proposal would also require people to show a photo ID either at polls or within six days of voting to have their vote counted.
Supporters argue the measure has polled well across all political demographics and would make Michigan’s election systems run safer.
Americans for Citizen Voting Chair Paul Jacob said he’s confident in the signatures the campaign collected.
“We have pored over them to make sure that they were done correctly. No system is perfect, we can’t know everything but we have worked very, very diligently and spent significant resources to pore over these petition signatures,” Jacob said during a press conference before dropping the signatures off with the Bureau of Elections Wednesday.
To qualify for the ballot, the campaign needed to collect 446,198 valid signatures. The campaign says it collected more than 750,000.
Despite that relatively high number, opponents of the measure say they plan to fight it every inch of the way between now and Election Day, arguing that cases of non-citizen voting have been exceptionally rare.
A key part of the measure would require the Secretary of State's Office to go over the existing voter rolls and remove people it can’t verify as a citizen.
Melinda Billingsley is a spokesperson with the group Voters Not Politicians. She said people could lose their power to vote just because they don’t have access to documents like a birth certificate or passport.
“We need voters to understand that there’s no need to change our election system and make our elections harder, and that this petition is just going to take away the power and the accessibility to their voting rights that they already have,” Billingsley said.
She questioned the tactics canvassers used to collect signatures in the first place.
“The real problem is not, in my opinion, this is popular with voters, it’s that voters were lied to and mislead,” Billingsley said.
Supporters of the measure, however, are dismissing opposition as false outrage.
They say it creates ways for people without IDs to receive a free ID and to have some special exceptions for cases when people can’t access their citizenship-proving documents.
Michigan House Election Integrity Committee Chair Rachelle Smit (R-Martin) said people shouldn’t worry about possibly being removed as officials check the voter roll.
“If you already have a driver’s license or ID, the secretary of state should already have your documents on file,” Smit said.
Next, state election officials will review the signatures to see if the campaign will qualify for the November ballot after all.
It’s unclear the timeline for that. A Michigan Department of State spokesperson said officials are first working on going through signatures for candidates filing for office -- a point of criticism for the ballot measure campaign.
