The good people of Michigan recently gathered a huge number of signatures to put an abortion-rights measure on the November ballot. The Bureau of Elections examined the petitions and found that the vast majority of signatures were valid. So, the citizens having spoken, they duly recommended it be put on the ballot.
But wait. The Board of State Canvassers has final say and its Republican members voted against allowing it on the ballot. Did they have a reason?
The board’s GOP members voted against approving the measure for the ballot after the anti-abortion group campaigning against the amendment, Citizens to Support MI Women and Children, argued that spacing and formatting errors in the text circulated to voters for their signatures rendered the effort invalid.
Say what? Spacing and formatting issues? Is this a deliberate joke? An explicit "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot"? Here's the entire text:
It's easy to see what happened here. The text is right-justified, and the word-processing program did a lousy job of it. Because of this, there are a few passages where the spacing between words is so small that it's hardly visible.
Nonetheless, it's easy to read and the text is clear. But this is what things have come to. The Republican board members are, indeed, explicitly saying "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot." So now it's on to the Michigan Supreme Court.
The decent of the Republican party writ large is nearing its completion. They have simply chosen to eliminate all elements of democracy from any part of the government they control.
Votethemout!
That’s really embarrassing though. Incompetent even.
Absolutely. Choice of type font is terrible (we invented serifs for a reason, readability) and printing in all upper-case is wrong, wrong, wrong.
+1 Missouri Medicaid Expansion
+1 Arkansas Minimum Wage Increase
+1 Florida Felon Reenfranchisement
For Republicans democracy is a bug not a feature.
Fair weather populism: Let the people be heard! (but only when they agree with what we think they should want)
This is how Liberty dies, to confusing and distasteful formatting.
[Padme wept]
It's the kind of pedantica I would expect from LARP ass nerds on high school debate teams.
The fact it plays with the White working class dumdums who were the first to bully the shit out of the debate team Glibertarians who grew up to make these arguments in the actual halls of power is terribly ironic.
The hole is getting deeper, but those bat shit crazy Republicans just keep digging..
Democracy shemocracy.
A reflection of the autocratic regime many conservatives have been pining for.
Just when you think they can’t get lower. It’s like we have 3 major parties. The smallest one being the Non-crazy Republicans.
Is there any recourse to countermand the GQP boardmember's obvious foul play, or would any court taking up that challenge just say "LOL nice try libz, but as we know from the case of Dan Rather v. Texas Air National Guard, checking the kerning is the most important precept under which are republican form of government was founded"?
So now the Republican Party is demanding we use only a certain kind of software, of course they will not tell us what that would be. What a pile of garbage. One would think you could remove these two idiots for cause.
The GOP mouthpiece on the board is Tony Daunt, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DeVos family. They're gambling that all those people enraged by Dobbs, and now this, will have calmed down by November.
I doubt it.
According to tthe link below Tony Daunt says that trump is "deranged narcissist", so this is a "sane republican".
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2022/04/26/michigan-republican-resigns-gop-post-citing-delusional-lies/9547809002/
I can't agree the text is "easy to read". It's legalese to begin with, but the apparent absence of spaces between words on many lines makes it a fair complaint that many signers were unlikely to have actually read the entire text. If I were on that board and trying to be completely neutral about the political issue, I think I'd have to agree that the form must be rejected. It's a case where the people pushing for change didn't get the basics right. That text screams out, "fix me," and it should have been easy to fix it.
It's always about the kerning.