At 4 p.m. on Tuesday, the 2018 election cycle will become much more focused as candidates line up at the Secretary of State headquarters in Lansing or county clerks' offices across the state to meet the deadline to file to run for office.
Hundreds of candidates have already taken the plunge and either filed petition signatures or paid the $100 filing fee. Six of the eight top candidates for governor have already filed the required petition signatures — between 15,000 and 30,000 from voters in at least half of the state's 14 congressional districts — and two more are expected to file their signatures before Tuesday's deadline.
Candidates for the U.S. Senate also are required to filed between 15,000 and 30,000 signatures while congressional candidates have to collect between 1,000 and 2,000 signatures from voters in their district. Candidates for the state House of Representatives and Senate can either turn in signatures — 200-400 for House candidates and 500-1,000 for Senate candidates — or pay a $100 filing fee.
But merely filing the signatures doesn't guarantee that a candidate will show up on the Aug. 7 primary ballot.
Any voter can file a challenge to the signatures and competing candidates often will fly speck each signature to make sure it comes from a valid registered voter. And there are plenty of things to challenge: fake names, duplicate signatures and outright fraud.
It's already happening. The Better Jobs, Stronger Families super PAC that is supporting Attorney General Bill Schuette's Republican campaign for governor has discovered 49 errant pages of signatures in the petitions submitted on Tuesday by Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, a Portland Republican also running for governor. Among the 25,000 signatures he filed were 47 pages of signatures for U.S. Senate candidate Sandy Pensler, of Grosse Pointe and two pages of signatures for Nancy Skinner, a Democratic candidate for the 11th congressional district.
It's not unusual for companies that collect signatures to be working for several different candidates, but no one at the Secretary of State's office can recall a similar situation to the Calley snafu, said Fred Woodhams, spokesman for the SOS.
Stu Sandler, executive director of the Schuette super PAC, said it's another example of the incompetence of Calley's campaign.
"We thought it was absolutely unbelievable," he said. "The clown car continues."
Even though the petitions for other candidates appeared in Calley's submission, they only represent about 500 signatures, which aren't enough, on their own, to disqualify Calley.
"A petition circulator collected signatures for a number of candidates, and some petitions for other candidates were mistakenly put in boxes for Brian Calley," said Calley campaign consultant Michael Stroud. "It doesn't impact the total count, and over 25,000 validated signatures for Brian Calley were properly filed."
Collecting signatures for candidates is not an easy task. Ed Sarpolus, a Lansing political consultant and the executive director of the Target Insyght polling firm, said a campaign has to vet both the people collecting signatures and the petition signatures as they come in.
"In 2012, we collected 6,000 signatures to find 1,000 good ones for John Conyers," he said, referring to former U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, who almost got kicked off the ballot in 2014 because of problems with his petitions
It took a federal judge to rule that petition signature gatherers didn't have to be residents of the district for Conyers to qualify for the 2014 ballot.
And in races with multiple candidates, successful challenges can be made for people who signed more than one candidate's petition. The first candidate to get the signature will be able to keep the signature. If the same signatures are found on other candidates' petitions, those later ones can get thrown out.
Steven Kwasny, campaign manager for Bill Cobbs, a Democratic candidate for governor, said he was still collecting signatures on Friday to add to the 20,000 they've already collected and plan to submit on Monday.
And Shri Thanedar, a retired Ann Arbor businessman seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, said he had gathered 29,000 signatures by mid-February, but wanted to wait until the last minute to turn them in.
"There’s no advantage in turning them in early," he said.
Gubernatorial candidates who have already turned in their signatures are Republicans Schuette, Calley, Sen. Patrick Colbeck of Canton, and Dr. Jim Hines of Saginaw Township, and Democrats former Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer of East Lansing and former Detroit Health Department Director Abdul El-Sayed of Shelby Township.
Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal
