Supreme Court emergency bid to put Michigan's voter ID amendment on the ballot

Key points: Supreme Court emergency bid

• The measure would amend the Michigan Constitution to add citizenship verification and voter identification requirements, and Americans for Citizen Voting submitted more than 700,000 signatures months ahead of the deadline against a requirement the video gives as roughly 446,000 in one pass and about 400,000 in another.
• Michigan certifies from a random sample rather than checking every signature, and on a sample needing 629 valid signatures the officials first counted 692, then dropped to 626 after challenges and further review — three short of the ballot.
• The due process claim is about evidence nobody outside the state can see: signatures were struck as non-matching against digitized copies in Michigan's Qualified Voter File, which the petitioners say they have never been permitted to review.
• Told they could rehabilitate disputed signatures with sworn statements, the group filed 23 notarized affidavits from the voters themselves and the board accepted 14, rejecting four for failing the same unseen file comparison and five as untimely for landing inside the 48-hour window before the meeting.
• The equal protection claim rests on those nine voters who swore under oath that the signatures were theirs and were excluded anyway, after election officials took about five and a half months for a review the petitioners were given days to answer.
• Timing is the entire posture: a mandamus petition went to the Michigan Supreme Court on August 27 asking for action by September 1, that court has not ruled, the Board of State Canvassers meets September 4 to finalize the ballot, and the application asks Washington for an injunction by September 3.
• The remedy argument is asymmetry — put it on the ballot and a no vote moots the fight while a yes vote can still be litigated, but keep it off and the harm is permanent if Michigan is later found to have acted unlawfully.

About this Drama and Gripe video

Supreme Court emergency application over Michigan's voter ID and citizenship-verification ballot measure: Americans for Citizen Voting gathered more than 700,000 signatures, but the state's random-sample review came back three valid signatures short, and the group says those rejections rest on digitized signatures in a Qualified Voter File it was never allowed to inspect. Armed Scholar walks the due process and equal protection claims and the September 3 injunction deadline. One note before you open it: this is his court-docket lane, not a firearms video — there are no guns in it.

Transcript: Supreme Court emergency