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MI

In order to appear on a primary ballot for the August 2 Democratic and Republican primaries, candidates have to submit between 15,000 and 30,000 signatures in addition to their filing paperwork. These signatures are submitted to the Board of State Canvassers, a bipartisan and independent board that verifies petition signatures. Within seven days of the filing deadline, citizens and organizations can challenge nomination signatures submitted by candidates. Voters are only allowed to sign one nomination petition.

By the deadline of April 26th, the Board of State Canvassers received 28 challenges to nomination petitions; three of them being challenges to Republican candidates running for Governor: James Craig, Tudor Dixon, and Perry Johnson. The Michigan Democratic Party alleged that Craig and Johnson had engaged in signature fraud with their petitions, while the challenge to Dixon additionally included the wording of the petition along with a challenge to the signatures. A Super PAC supporting Dixon called Michigan Strong had also challenged Craig's petition due to signature issues.

By the middle of May, Craig had confirmed that his petition had submitted fraudulent signatures. Craig's campaign hired Vanguard Field Strategies of Axiom Strategies to handle the ballot signatures after initially attempting to handle gathering the signatures themselves. Vanguard Field Strategies subcontracted the signatures out to In Field Strategies.

A report by the Michigan Bureau of Elections was published on May 23rd which alleged that 36 paid signature circulators faked signatures and 30 had engaged in practices that added fraudulent signatures to other candidates petitions. Due to the fraudulent signatures, the Bureau added an additional step where each petition was checked to determine if that campaign had used any of the 36 circulators. Those that did had the individual petition sheets that were signed off by those circulators separated from the rest of the petition to review if any of the signatures present were valid. After this separate review, none of these separated sheet had any valid signatures on them. With these signatures removed, the petitions were recalculated to determine if the candidate had the minimum required signatures. The campaigns of James Craig, Donna Brandenburg, Michael Brown, and Michael Jay Markey Jr. were all deemed to have insufficient signatures in their petitions after this step. The Bureau confirmed that the Craig campaign had missed the deadline to file additional signatures on the 19th by about 30 minutes, which the Michigan Strong Super PAC had claimed was 4,200 additional signatures, though that amount was still short of the deficit of 4,808 valid signatures. For the petition submitted by Perry Johnson's campaign, this step reduced the number of signatures that went to "face review" to 16,210. That amount was reduced further during the face review due to issues such as jurisdiction errors, circulator error, and date errors, to 13,800 valid signatures, leaving a deficit of 1,200 valid signatures. As for Tudor Dixon's campaign, the number of challenged and fraudulent signatures was significantly less than the number of total valid signatures and the Bureau rejected a challenge to disqualify all remaining signatures as the error in Dixon's petition was deemed to be harmless as the mistake was regarding when the term ended, which is not required to be included in the petition under Michigan law.

An eight-hour meeting of the Board of State Canvassers reached a deadlock on whether to allow the candidates in question to stay on the ballot. Due to the deadlock, the candidates in question were not allowed to appear on the primary ballot. The rushed pace of the proceedings and the decision were criticized by Common Cause of Michigan, whose policy director claimed that the candidates in question had to plead their cases to the Board of Canvassers days after finding out about the alleged fraud themselves.

Several candidates filed lawsuits appealing the decision; x to y and both aa and bb to cc. These suits were rejected in the Michigan Court of Appeals on date and the other on date. At least two of the candidates involved had pledged to appeal their cases to the Michigan Supreme Court. MISC ruled on 9th no.

Johnson filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on June 6th, which was denied on June 13th.

Brandenburg filed a lawsuit with the Michigan Supreme Court on June 2nd, which was rejected on June 7th

Of the disqualified candidates, Craig was the only candidate to file as a write-in candidate. Additionally, Craig filed a lawsuit against In Field Strategies and a significant number of circulators due to claims of fraud, breach of contract, and breach of warranty on June 13th. Shortly afterwards,