Non-Registered Voters Gathered Signatures for John Conyers: Disqualified From Ballot Until Liberal Judge Stepped-In

Remember the 2012 presidential elections when Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich failed to receive the required 10,000 signatures for a ballot placement in the important state of Virginia? They did not end up on the ballot, but Democrats in Michigan have better fortunes. Congressman John Conyers, running for yet another opportunity to screw the American people through his congressional privilege, allowed non-registered voters to circulate petitions gathering names for his run, and -- the petitions failed to get the required 1,000 VALID signatures. After the INVALID names were removed, Conyers had only about 400 presumed VALID names. The petitions were still circulated by unqualified persons. The Michigan Secretary of State said Conyers' name would not be on the ballot and cited the state's "purity of the ballot access process," but a Detroit federal judge cited Conyers' "good intentions." Guess who won.

"The Michigan Election Law is designed to protect the purity of the ballot access process," the Secretary of State's review said. "The laws governing this activity place affirmative duties on petition circulators. As evidenced over the past two election cycles, when campaigns fail to comply with the law by executing basic principles of petition circulation, they create their own 'ballot access crisis' when their failures are discovered by or brought to the attention of election officials. In this instance, consultant Steve Hood freely admitted that he failed to ensure that the petition circulators he hired to work on Conyers' campaign were registered to vote."

"The Michigan Election Law is designed to protect the purity of the ballot access process," the Secretary of State's review said. "The laws governing this activity place affirmative duties on petition circulators. As evidenced over the past two election cycles, when campaigns fail to comply with the law by executing basic principles of petition circulation, they create their own 'ballot access crisis' when their failures are discovered by or brought to the attention of election officials. In this instance, consultant Steve Hood freely admitted that he failed to ensure that the petition circulators he hired to work on Conyers' campaign were registered to vote."Despite the state's legal findings on the very same day that state election authorities determined that Conyers did not belong on the ballot, the Obama-appointed federal judge reversed that decision and insisted he be placed there anyway. 

And Conners' "good faith intentions:"

There's evidence that the failure to comply with the law was a "result of good-faith mistakes that (circulators) believed they were in compliance with the statute," the judge said. Source: Fox News

A little more detail:

After Conyers’s primary opponent, Reverend Horace Sheffield, challenged the congressman’s ballot petition, election officials discovered that a large number of his campaign’s signatures had been collected by volunteers who weren’t registered Michigan voters, as the law required. Source: National Review Online 

Sheffield is a Democrat. He was allegedly arrested and charged with "misdemeanor violence."

Another example:

In 2012, Michigan Republican representative Thad McCotter was kept off of the ballot because of invalid signatures. McCotter initially pursued a write-in campaign, before eventually dropping the effort and resigning from Congress.

Conyers said he trying not to "smile openly."

Find Cartoonist Mike Thompson's Facebook page here, and at Detroit Free Press here.

Posted by Maggie @ Maggie's Notebook