Almost Out of Runway: Citizen Voting Proposal's Final Attempts to Secure the Required Signatures
Updated: Aug 25
By Kristine Christlieb, MFEI News & Commentary Editor
August 24, 2026
Supporters of the Americans for Citizen Voting initiative are making a final push to cure signatures Bureau of Elections staff claim are invalid, as the campaign heads into a decisive vote before Michigan's Board of State Canvassers later today.
Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan (ACVM) submitted 709,841 signatures in March — more than 260,000 above the 446,198 required to place its citizenship-verification and voter-ID constitutional amendment on the November ballot.
The Bureau of Elections' (BOE) signature verification process doesn't check every signature. Instead, it conducts a "single-stage, random sampling process" of 1,000 signatures and extrapolates. That 1,000-signature sample needs to yield 629 valid signatures.
The BOE staff's initial pass through the sample found 692 valid signatures — comfortably above the threshold. But the count fell to 612 after Promote the Vote Action, a group opposing the amendment, formally challenged 377 of the sampled signatures.
ACVM's campaign, in turn, sought to rehabilitate 149 of the challenged signatures; BOE staff restored only five of them. The final tally: 612 valid signatures, 17 short of the 629 needed. BOE staff recommended the Board of State Canvassers find the petition signatures insufficient and decline to certify them for the November ballot.
The Board of State Canvassers, a bipartisan four-member panel split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, is not bound by the staff report, but it typically follows the Bureau's recommendation — thus ACVM's weekend scramble.
ACVM submitted its signatures in March, but a very real and present clock is ticking. Today's vote is the only scheduled opportunity to certify the signatures; there's no realistic path for the proposal to reach the November ballot through the ordinary certification process without it — though litigation remains a possible, if compressed, avenue if the Board rejects the petition. Even if the signatures are certified today, the Board must still finalize the proposal's 100-word ballot summary and certify it to county clerks by September 4 — a hard statutory deadline under MCL 168.480, just 11 days away. Miss that date, and the measure cannot appear on the November ballot regardless of the signature count.
In a telephone interview, Patrice Johnson, founder and chair of Michigan Fair Elections Institute, said, "Even though ACVM had its signatures submitted very early in the process, its proposal signatures were reviewed last."
ACVM's Weekend Hustle
On Friday, Aug. 21, attorneys for ACVM filed a lengthy response with the Board disputing the Bureau's findings point by point.
The 37-page letter, submitted by Sean T.H. Dutton and Eric E. Doster of the Kienbaum Hardy Viviano Pelton Forrest firm, argues the staff report applied inconsistent standards. For example, it claimed the BOE treated a separate petition (Michiganders for Money Out of Politics) more leniently for similar damage, missing-element, and city/township-naming issues.
The filing walks through several categories of disputed signatures: petitions coded invalid for damage or missing elements where letters remained legible; voters coded as unregistered whom counsel says voter-file searches confirm are registered; signatures flagged as duplicates that counsel argues rest on faulty universe entries; and circulator certificates coded deficient that counsel says were simply misread.
A significant portion of the rebuttal leans on outside expertise. Forensic document examiner Erich J. Speckin of Speckin Forensics reviewed disputed dates and signatures across the sample and concluded, in a report attached as an exhibit, that several numerals the Bureau read as invalid — mistaking a "5" for a "6," for instance — were in fact correctly dated.
For 17 individual signatures still coded as non-matching, the campaign submitted notarized affidavits from the actual signers attesting they signed the petition, a rehabilitation method the campaign's counsel says mirrors what Bureau of Elections Director Jonathan Brater has described as acceptable practice for validating disputed signatures on the record.
Paul Jacob, chairman of Americans for Citizen Voting, has been leading efforts on the ground to gather that supporting documentation ahead of today's vote. In the days after the staff report was released, Jacob told the Detroit News: "We need to make up 17 signatures out of the 1,000-signature random sample and we're going to do it."
Forlini Weighs In
The petition has also drawn public backing from Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini, the Republican nominee for Michigan Secretary of State, who was an early supporter.
In an op-ed published in The Detroit News on Saturday, Forlini argued the Board's decision is riding on a review process the public can't independently verify.
"Citizens cannot independently examine petition signatures against the voter-registration signatures used for comparison," Forlini wrote. "They cannot audit the vendor's sampling algorithm. When more than 700,000 signatures are at stake, 'trust us' is not enough."
Forlini said he isn't prejudging the Board's decision and acknowledged the bipartisan Board approved the sampling methodology in the first place. But he questioned both the transparency of the signature-verification process and the timeline — noting the petition was filed 244 days before the election, in March, yet remains unresolved just before the deadline that leaves little room for further appeal.
He also drew a connection to his own record, flagging noncitizens in Macomb County's voter rolls and jury pools, writing that the lesson of that experience is that "election integrity cannot be a partisan issue," and, he added, "neither can transparency."
What Happens Today
If the Board declines to certify the petition, ACVM's effort to reach the November ballot ends unless further legal action is taken. If the Board sides with the campaign's arguments and finds enough of the disputed signatures valid to clear the 629-signature threshold, the process moves to a vote on whether to approve the 100-word ballot summary language, positioning the measure for the November ballot.
Either way, today's meeting — set for 10 a.m. at the Binsfeld Office Building in Lansing — is expected to be the decisive moment for a petition that has spent more than five months in review since it was filed.
Watch for breaking news on the BOSC decision on MFEI's X account.
Interested In Watching the Hearing?
Board meetings held at the Delta Township Office Building will be streamed live on either the Michigan Department of State YouTube channel or the Board of State Canvassers YouTube channel.
Board meetings held at the Binsfeld Office Building will be streamed live on Michigan Senate TV.
Following all meetings, the meeting video is added to the Board of State Canvassers YouTube channel.
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