The downside of a good turnout: Everyone was — rightly — ecstatic that so many Michiganders voted in the 2018 midterm election. More than a million more votes were cast in the governor’s race than four years before. But there was one drawback:
For at least the next four years, it will be harder to get something on the ballot. That’s because the number of signatures required is fixed at one percent of the total vote cast for governor.
This means that this year, it took only 315,654 valid signatures to put a proposed State Constitutional Amendment on the ballot. Now, thanks to the higher turnout, you’ll need at least 425,059. In practice, that means at you’ll need about a hundred thousand more than that; some signatures are always invalid, since many people sign twice or do things like forgetting which county they live in.
The number of signatures needed to get an initiative on the ballot jumps from 252,523 to 340,057; for a simple referendum, the numbers go from 157,827 to 212,530, according to calculations made by the respected Gongwer news service.
What this mostly means is higher expenses for special interests, which usually are behind efforts to get something on the ballot. The going rate for petition signatures, by the way, is about $2.
Occasionally, as with the successful Voters Not Politicians amendment, citizen volunteers have been successful at getting something on the ballot. But many attempts have fallen short – and last month’s high turnout will make getting on the ballot a little harder.
By the way, if you and your buddies are starting a new political party and want it listed on Michigan’s ballot, you’ll be pounding a bit more pavement looking for signatures too. You need one percent of the vote cast for governor, or 42,506 signatures, up more than eleven thousand from what it was before. Man those clipboards!
— Jack Lessenberry
