The Michigan gubernatorial election is in turmoil after the state’s Bureau of Elections determined that several Republican candidates submitted tens of thousands of invalid, fraudulent petition signatures. That has left many candidates, including the current frontrunner, short of the 15,000 signatures needed to appear on the primary ballot.
This fiasco highlights America’s problematic obsession with using high petitioning hurdles as barriers to ballot access. Unique among major democracies, many American states require thousands of signatures from eligible voters before a candidate can be placed on the ballot. In Michigan, which has especially severe requirements for statewide races, major party candidates for governor need 15,000 valid signatures. In practice, this means hiring professional petitioners to gather signatures by going door to door or approaching people on the street. The petitioning market can be lucrative, especially at times of peak demand. Rates of $4 or $5 per signature are not uncommon, and sometimes even higher. As several Michigan Republicans are now learning the hard way, that market is also rife with fraud, given the large cash incentives on the table and relatively low (but obviously not zero) risk of getting caught.
Knocking opponents off the ballot by challenging their petitions is not a new phenomenon, either. In 1996, one Democratic state senate hopeful in Chicago successfully challenged the petitions of all three of his would-be opponents, leaving himself unopposed for the nomination in a deep-blue district. After two terms in the Illinois legislature, he went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and, in 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.
America’s use of extremely large and burdensome ballot access petitions is a major outlier among democracies. In Canada, you can run for parliament with merely 100 signatures. In the United Kingdom, candidates need only file a deposit of £500, which is refunded for candidates who get at least 5% of the vote, together with just ten signatures. These sorts of de minimis hurdles are the norm in almost every other country with free and fair elections.
Ballot access barriers are meant to ensure that only serious candidates qualify to appear on the ballot, so that the ballot design isn’t cluttered and voters are not confused by dozens of joke candidates or unserious contenders. At the extreme without any such measures, you can wind up with elections like California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall with in excess of a hundred candidates. It’s reasonable that lawmakers don’t want the ballots to be stuffed with what amounts to electoral spam. But this goal can be accomplished through the use of small petitions, in the dozens or at most low hundreds of signatures, or with the use of reasonable filing fees. Moreover, there’s little evidence that voters are in fact confused by having too many candidates on the ballot.
Requiring thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of petition signatures is fiendishly expensive, both for the candidates themselves and for the state election agencies that have to administer and verify the process. Candidates must make sure they submit well in excess of the number required, usually around 25 to 50 percent more, to provide a safety margin for when a large portion of the signatures are inevitably found invalid (mostly for technical defects such as a wrong address or missing date, not deliberate fraud). If their validity rate is too low, it’s usually too late for candidates to make up the difference. Petition signatures also have little real connection to a candidate’s level of public support, instead reflecting only how much they were able to spend to pester enough people into signing for a candidate that, most of the time, the voter has never even heard of before.
This process has included absurdities such as handwriting arguments over whether a “signature” is invalid because the voter instead “printed” his or her name. Voters are often required to know what legislative districts they live in, which most don’t. It’s an invitation to corruption, both by fraudulent signature-gatherers and by candidates seeking an underhanded way to eliminate their competition. These laws invite gaming the system for partisan motives, such as unequal requirements to disadvantage third party and independent candidates, which are common in many states. Restrictive ballot access laws are also the subject of frequent litigation as states bump up against the vague federal precedents for how burdensome is too burdensome. Such litigation exploded during the pandemic in particular, when public health concerns made gathering signatures face-to-face effectively impossible.
At his website Ballot Access News, nationally recognized expert Richard Winger reports on an endless stream of disputes, lawsuits, rank unfairness, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. And it’s an aspect of our electoral system that most voters are totally unaware of and are often surprised to learn about. Ballot access petitions rarely get much attention until, as in Michigan, there’s a high-profile disaster.
States like Michigan could save both taxpayers and campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars every election cycle by reducing the number of signatures required, and/or by providing an option to pay a filing fee in lieu of a petition. Florida provides a reasonable model for the latter option. In that state, almost all candidates opt to pay a few thousand dollars rather than go through the much more costly and uncertain process of petitioning. In doing so, they also save the state from the time-consuming and laborious process of petition verification. And the state avoids the democratic legitimacy problems that can come from keeping candidates off the ballot even when they unquestionably have substantial support from voters.
Michigan itself already knows how to do this for lower offices: major party candidates for state legislature and in some local races need only pay a $100 filing fee. That procedure could easily be extended to statewide and federal elections, too. If a filing fee option had been in place for governor, Michigan Republicans would not be facing an absurd scenario where their most popular candidates for the state’s highest office won’t even be on the ballot.
There is no legitimate public purpose served, and there are substantial needless costs imposed, by requiring candidates to gather an absurdly large number of petition signatures. Michigan legislators would do well to reconsider their laws to avoid a repeat of this trainwreck.
