LANSING, Mich.—Michigan election officials will review petitions to put a measure repealing the state’s
prevailing-wage law on the ballot after opponents said a random sample had more than one-third invalid signatures. The Board of State Canvassers announced Feb. 14 that it would review a random sample of 4,443 signatures after Protect Michigan Jobs, a group supporting the prevailing wage law, filed a challenge saying it had found almost 1,500 signatures in the sample that were duplicates, not registered voters, or not properly circulated. The larger sample was triggered after the board’s previous audit of 535 sample signatures submitted by the pro-repeal organization Protecting Michigan Taxpayers found that less than the 70% needed to certify the initiative were valid. The group submitted 380,000 signatures, well over the roughly 252,000 needed to qualify for the ballot, but its similar initiative in 2015 failed to qualify because it had too many invalid signatures. “The sheer number of invalid signatures submitted by Protecting Michigan Taxpayers makes it no surprise that the organization fought so hard last month to avoid a larger sample,” Geno Alessandrini, business manager for the Michigan Laborers Union, said in a statement. Read more
