Canvassers Vice Chair Calls 48-Hour Rule “Determinative,” Then Backpedals
By Kristine Christlieb, Editor, MFEI News & Commentary
October 15, 2026
A new Michigan House committee is scrutinizing why a petition with more than 700,000 signatures failed to qualify for the November 3 ballot.
The House Select Committee on the Rules and Procedures of the Board of State Canvassers and the Bureau of Elections met for the third time Wednesday, Oct. 14, and in a marathon, three-hour session, heard testimony about why the Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan’s (ACVM) ballot petition was rejected. The petition proposed amending the state constitution to require individuals to prove their U.S. citizenship to register to vote and to show valid photo ID for an in-person ballot to count.
A ballot petition in Michigan requires 446,198 voter registrant signatures. ACVM filed 709,841 signatures, 59.1% more than required, four months before the filing deadline. But the Bureau of Elections’ sampling technique of 1,000 signatures failed to show a high enough ratio of valid signatures. On August 24, the Board of State Canvassers deadlocked in a 2-2 tie vote, which prevented the petition question from appearing on the November 3 ballot. Two days later, the Michigan House of Representatives created a Select Committee to investigate.
Select Committee Chairman Mike Harris (R-Waterford Township), who called Wednesday’s agenda “action-packed,” opened the hearing by inviting testimony from the Board of State Canvassers’ Republican chairman, Richard Houskamp, and its Democratic vice chair, Mary Ellen Gurewitz. Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s Director of Elections, and Eric Doster, attorney for Americans for Citizen Voting–Michigan (ACVM), testified next.
Houskamp compared two petitions reviewed within weeks of one another but with opposite outcomes. Michiganders for Money Out of Politics (MMOP) made the ballot with just nine sample signatures to spare. Americans for Citizen Voting Michigan (ACVM) fell three signatures short.
Houskamp said he had a “particular interest” in the 94 signatures from ACVM’s 1,000-signature sample that the Bureau of Elections (BOE) staff ruled did not match the signatures on file in the Qualified Voter File (QVF). He told the committee those 94 signatures should be the priority. “To me, this represented the one thing that’s even above the constitutional framework we have, and that is the voter, the individual qualified with the right to sign that. So that’s where I put the argument.”
Gurewitz had a different perspective. She referenced a Michigan Court of Appeals case, Neilson v. Board of State Canvassers. Lisa Marie Neilson wanted to run for the Michigan Court of Appeals, but she was short the needed number of valid signatures. She tried to rehabilitate some of the signatures with signed affidavits but presented them after the Board of State Canvassers’ stated deadline. The Board refused to accept the affidavits, and the Court of Appeals supported the Board’s stated deadline.
According to Gurewitz, because of that case the Board “adopted a rule that no further evidence could be submitted later than 48 hours before a hearing, and that is the rule we applied with regard to the Citizens Voting petition.” The 48-hour provision appears in R 168.846 of the Board’s hearing rules, as in effect since May 12, 2025.
Gurewitz acknowledged Houskamp “didn’t want to apply that rule, but we did. I’m an attorney. He’s not. (laughing) I’m more hung up on procedure and rules. We disagreed on that, and ultimately it was the determinative deci—” Then she caught herself and course-corrected, saying, “I’m not so sure it was the determinative decision.”
Later, Bureau of Elections Director Jonathan Brater testified that there are now real questions about the application of the 48-hour rule. He said the Board had hoped for “a nice, clean policy” that would “sort everything out,” but “of course, we have new scenarios that we didn’t anticipate. We have very talented and dogged attorneys on both sides making the case as to why it should or should not apply in this way, so we’ve got something we’re going to have to evaluate in the future as to exactly what that 48-hour rule applies to.”
Questions about Statistical Sampling
In 2023, the Board adopted a new sampling method recommended by Rehmann Robson LLC of Grand Rapids and statistically validated by David Merolla, then chair of the sociology department at Wayne State University.
Chairman Harris asked Director Brater if the Board had the authority to make a change in the sampling method. “That’s an interesting question,” Brater said. “I don’t know that . . . It’s possible the Bureau of Elections might have the authority to promulgate rules. . . . It might be beneficial to actually have some rulemaking authority so that this could go through the rulemaking process.”
Harris summed up, “So we don’t know,” and Brater admitted, “It’s a legal question for sure.”
Different Standards Applied to Petitions
Doster closed out the hearing, saying the focus of his testimony would be to show “different standards were used to review the ACVM petition than were used just a month earlier with respect to the MMOP petition.”
He provided evidence of at least four categories in which different standards were applied:
· Circulator city or township discrepancies
· Damaged/missing element sheets
· Challenges after the deadline
· Materials at the hearing
Doster also addressed the 48-hour rule, saying the rule applies only to “members of the public,” whereas ACVM was a sponsor of the petition, a completely different category.
Doster concluded, “If the same standards and procedures applied to ACVM as they did to MMOP just with respect to these four categories alone, ACVM would have been credited with 14 more petition signatures” and would have cleared certification.
Rep. Rachelle Smit (R-Shelbyville) followed up, expressing her gratitude for Doster's analysis and saying. “To me, it is unfathomable, the treatment of what took place here, after seeing this evidence.”
Is There a Remedy?
Some are wondering, if the Select Committee determines the ACVM petition was rejected in error, how will that be addressed. “If there’s a wrong, there must be a remedy,” wrote Patrice Johnson, Chair and Founder of the Michigan Fair Elections Institute in a statement to MFEI News & Commentary. She also wrote that the idea the Board of State Canvassers and the Bureau of Elections could sample only about 0.14 percent of the signatures and use that sample to reject a constitutional amendment ballot initiative that had gathered 263,643 more signatures than required was an example of executive branch overreach. “MFEI has found no statute or promulgated rule that authorizes rejecting a petition on the basis of a random sample, let alone a tiny 1,000-signature sample drawn by software whose statistical method has never been disclosed.”
Johnson thinks a special election should be considered. “I’m not sure how or under whose authority it could be put on the ballot, but there has to be a way to make right the errors that were visited upon this petition process. So far, that hasn’t been discussed.”
Johnson is the primary author of the newly released “Treatment of Americans for Citizen Voting – Michigan (ACVM) Ballot Petition,” a 100-page report examining how the petition was reviewed and the questions that process raises.
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