Citizens to Support Mi Women & Children Petition
- Wed, Aug 17, 2022 5:56 PM
43 Errors Found in Petition
Throughout the process of fighting the anything-goes RFFA abortion amendment, our coalition has had a thorough legal team working behind the scenes to put roadblocks in their way. Here is a timeline to remind you of the challenges.
January 7th: Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Michigan Voices announce the pro-abortion ballot proposal.
February 11th: The petition is presented to the Michigan Board of Canvassers. Our coalition legal team challenged the union logo due to incorrect font size. The Board of Canvassers agreed that the font size needed to be edited to match the legally required format for all petitions in Michigan
.
March 23rd: The legal team for Planned Parenthood and ACLU presented the revised petition with the correct union logo to the board once again for approval. Our legal team came back with another challenge to their petition on the use of the word "the" in a spot that didn't meet legal requirements. The challenge was small, but effective. The board, while annoyed, had to agree with the challenge and granted conditional approval only if the RFFA removed the extra word. This same error led to the RFFA having to reprint all petitions and pull petitions from the field that were already circulating, ultimately costing them serious dollars.
Between April and July: The petition was being circulated all across Michigan, allowing for RFFA to gather more than 750,000 signatures—well over the required 425,059 signatures. From our analysis of the petitions, it appears that most of the signatures were collected after the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in the Dobbs case was leaked.
August 16th: Once again, our attorneys did their due diligence and found a serious printing error on the petitions. The error appears on the backside of the petition which features the actual language of the amendment. This language is important because it is the text that will appear in our state constitution if passed. We found 43 spacing errors that result in the text reading like this:
· DECISIONSABOUTALLMATTERSRELATINGTOPREGNANCY
· INCLUDINGBUTNOTLIMITEDTOPRENATALCARE
· POSTPARTUMCARE
· ORALLEGEDPREGNANCYOUTCOMES
· INCLUDINGBUTNOTLIMITEDTOMISCARRIAGE
· ORABORTION
· PREGNANCYWHEN
· JUDGMENTOF
· ANDBASEDONTHEPARTICULAR
· FACTSOFTHECASE
· THEREISASIGNIFICANTLIKELIHOOD
· OFTHEFETUS'SSUSTAINEDSURVIVALOUTSIDETHE
Our Spokesperson for this coalition summarized the gibberish language perfectly:
“This amendment cannot be made part of your constitution in its current form. And there is no legal or constitutional process for changing the text of the amendment at this late stage. It is shocking, indeed, that more than three-quarters of a million voters—including the Governor and the state Attorney General—signed a petition they didn’t read and couldn’t understand. But this error-riddled mess cannot be put on the ballot."
As of right now, these 43 errors will be presented to the Bureau of Elections, who will then recommend to the Board of Canvassers if the errors should be considered in the next meeting on August 31st. More updates on this to come, so stay tuned.