Heh! John Conyers may not make it onto the ballot this year

[Adam]

John Conyers’ must fight legal battle to prevent write-in candidacy

U.S. Representative John Conyers, a 50 year member of Congress, is now looking at a write in candidacy to gain a 26th term in office.

Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett told Local Four News on camera that Conyers appears to lack enough valid petition signatures to appear on the ballot.

“The signatures don’t come up to what the Congressman would need,” Garrett said.

She noted her office does not take sides in elections and only attempts to enforce election law. She said, based on the latest information her office received from the Detroit City Clerk, two Conyers’ circulators, Daniel Pennington and Tiara Willis Pittman, only registered to vote last Monday. That was long after they turned in roughly 400 signatures for Conyers.

According to state law petition circulators in partisan races must be a registered voter at the time they gather signatures. Because many of Conyers’ signatures were collected by then-unqualified voters, those signatures are likely invalid.

“Based on the information that this office received from Janice Winfrey’s office, he doesn’t [qualify for the ballot],” Garrett said.

However, she hedged that statement by saying this is not a final, final decision because the window for the signature challenges doesn’t close until May 7th. Until that deadline passes, nothing is final.

But I asked her “is it likely, in your estimation, knowing what you know now that this information could change?”

Her answer: “No.”

I feel sure that Conyers will probably manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat over the weekend, but still ....

[Adam]

This gets even better. One of the petitioners not only didn't register to vote until after he turned in the signatures, but in fact he's a paroled felon on the lam and cannot legally register to vote at all, meaning that he committed another felony by registering to vote trying to cover for Conyers.

[Adam]

It's semi-official. Conyers will likely take this to court, but it seems doubtful that he could prevail there: the case is pretty plain: he got a minimum number of signatures (is it really that hard for John Conyers to collect 2000 signatures in downtown Detroit?), and no one bothered vetting the people doing the canvassing. As such, they didn't even come close to meeting the legal requirements.

Astoundingly stupid.

[Billy Jingo]

That is really bizarre.

Perhaps after 50 years you start thinking it is something other than an elected office.

[Adam]

That is really bizarre.

Perhaps after 50 years you start thinking it is something other than an elected office.

That's my best guess: he just felt like all he had to do was go through the motions. And really, that's probably all he would have had to do, if he had done it properly. But my God, after so many of these have blown up in the recent past (all over Indiana in 2008, for example), you'd think a career politician would get way more than the minimum number of signatures to make damn well certain that something didn't blow up in their face. It's certainly worth paying a couple of flunkies (whom you actually vet) for another couple of days at $10/hour to get plenty of extra signatures.

[Michele]

Bert Johnson, a state senator who is running Mr. Conyers’s campaign, said in an interview on Tuesday that the campaign was prepared to take legal action to ensure that Mr. Conyers’s name would end up on the ballot.

“The congressman went to bed believing he had 2,000 good signatures in, and he came up short,” Mr. Johnson said. “He’s very, very disappointed. It’s a very bad scenario that has played out, and the congressman is the victim of it.”

He added, “We have to ask the obvious question of whether the congressman was set up.”

Spoken like a guy who's responsible for a screw-up and needs to pass the buck.

Somehow, I think Conyers will be just fine even if he's a write-in..the votes will be found.

[Adam]

This is interesting. I was mistaken before. I thought that the requirement was 2,000 signatures and he had turned in exactly 2000 signatures. That's not correct. The requirement is 1,000 signatures, but Conyers turned in 2,000. So, he actually didn't do the minimum and nothing more as I had thought. He just did a spectacularly shitty and dishonest job of it:

Conyers, 84, who is the second-longest-serving active member of Congress -- behind only the retiring U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-Dearborn) -- turned in 2,000 petition signatures before the April 22 deadline to apply for a spot on the Aug. 5 ballot.

Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett's office initially found 1,193 of them to be valid, but the congressman's primary opponent, Rev. Horace Sheffield of Detroit, filed a challenge based on accusations that two young campaign workers, Tiara Pittman, 19, and Daniel Pennington, 22, were not registered voters when they circulated petitions for Conyers' ballot application.

Garret subsequently disqualified hundrdeds of signatures, leaving Conyers far shy of the required 1,000.

So, out of the 2,000 signatures that he did turn in, forty percent of those signatures were, basically, somehow fraudulent. Someone has to be willfully trying to screw that up.

This wasn't just some rookie mistake made by a veteran. This was actually a specific intent to deceive and not get the required signatures. That's just amazing. How freaking hard is it to come up with 1,000 valid signatures in his district? There's bound to be several hundred donors of one sort another in his district alone. There's something like 740,000 people in his district. Even if only a third of them are actually properly-registered voters there, then that's still a gigantic pool of people who could be asked for a signature. I could get that many in a weekend, for cryin' out loud, and I'm a cripple on a cane!

[gary m]

Yeah, fat chance of that happening

Federal Bullshit

Representative John Conyers Jr. narrowly escaped a political fiasco on Friday when a federal judge granted him a place on the primary ballot in August, allowing him to survive a campaign misstep that left him hundreds of valid signatures short of the number required for his re-election petition.

The ruling came just hours after the Michigan Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson, rejected an appeal from the Conyers campaign.

Mr. Conyers, a Democrat who was first elected in 1964, found his re-election chances at risk because his campaign failed to collect 1,000 valid signatures on petitions for re-election. What initially appeared to be a minor misstep quickly became a grievous error that threatened the career of one of the most senior members of Congress, who is a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus and the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

In issuing his injunction, Judge Matthew Leitman of Federal District Court said that the “failure to comply with the registration statute was the result of good-faith mistakes.”

This is unmitigated horse shit. A 50 year member of the House cannot figure out how to legally get the signatures of 1000 registered voters in a district of approximately 500,000 age eligible voters.

Not that our Secretary of State has the guts to do it, but she refuse to honor the injunction pending a ruling by the USSC.

[Adam]

Constitutional requirements are now not Constitutional. Everyone act surprised.