James Craig campaign filing 'immediate appeal' to try to keep governor bid alive

Lansing — Former Detroit police chief James Craig's campaign said Thursday it's filing an "immediate appeal in the courts" to try to get his name on the August primary ballot.

Craig's team announced the move about an hour after the Board of State Canvassers voted to block five GOP candidates for governor, including the retired police chief, from the Aug. 2 ballot because of a wave of allegedly forged petition signatures.

The board's votes were 2-2, with the two Democrats supporting findings from the Bureau of Elections that the candidates didn't have the required 15,000 valid signatures. The two Republicans on the board opposed the recommendations, arguing that the bureau's staff hadn't individually invalidated each faulty signature that was labeled fraudulent.

"We are disappointed in the Board of Canvassers decision, but we are not surprised the partisan Democrats on the committee ruled against Michigan voters," Craig said in a statement. "It is a travesty that partisans in a position to uphold democracy and the will of the people allowed politics to get in the way.    

"It was clear during the testimony today that the (Bureau of Elections) staff did not perform its legal obligation to reject signatures on a line-by-line basis against the qualified voter file," the former chief added. "Rather, they rejected whole pages based on their own determination of fraud. In addition to the BOE not performing it’s duties according to Michigan law, the BOE chose to withhold the suspicion of fraud from the campaign’s until two days before their public hearing."

Craig said his campaign was "confident that when the law is justly applied," his name will make the ballot.

However, Mark Brewer, former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party and a longtime elections lawyer, said the Board of State Canvassers had the right to disqualify entire pages of signatures because the circulators who collected fraudulent petitions had lied about their activities on their paperwork.

"The patterns are undeniable, sheet after sheet of identifiable handwriting, sheets that never saw the outside of a room because they were passed around a table," Brewer said.

Brewer filed a complaint against Craig's signatures in April, saying he had never seen such evidence of forgery and fraud in a petition drive in the nearly 40 years he's been practicing law.

Craig has been widely viewed as the frontrunner in the GOP primary to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the November general election.

The Board of State Canvassers also voted to disqualify businessman Perry Johnson of Bloomfield Hills, financial adviser Michael Markey of Grand Haven, entrepreneur of Donna Brandenburg of Byron Center and Michigan State Police Capt. Michael Brown of Stevensville.

In reviewing candidates' petition signatures, which were due April 19, the bureau said it had tracked 36 petition circulators "who submitted fraudulent petition sheets consisting entirely of invalid signatures" across its review of candidates' filings.

"In total, the bureau estimates that these circulators submitted at least 68,000 invalid signatures submitted across 10 sets of nominating petitions," the report said. "In several instances, the number of invalid signatures submitted by these circulators was the reason a candidate had an insufficient number of valid signatures."

Michigan's elections director, Jonathan Brater, said Bureau of Elections staff checked about 7,000 signatures among about 68,000 from the allegedly fraudulent circulators against the qualified voter file, which contains voter records and their signatures.

“We did not find a single registered voter with a matching signature for any of those circulators for any candidate of the ones we looked at,” Brater said. “If we found even a small number that looked legitimate, we took them out of the fraudulent circulator category and they are not reflected in this report.”

Brandenburg, Craig, Johnson and Markey have all indicated they will fight the bureau's findings. Brown has already ended his campaign for governor.

During Thursday's board meeting, Jason Torchinsky, Johnson's legal counsel, suggested Johnson would challenge the board's decision in court.

"The board's action today makes clear that the SOS's (Secretary of State's) process has fatal flaws that didn't follow election law," Torchinsky said in a statement. "We are confident that faithful application of Michigan law will result in Perry Johnson being placed on the ballot."

Brater said the state Bureau of Elections was "confident" the thousands of signatures in question were fraudulent. And Brater said none of the campaigns had identified specific valid signatures to refute the forgery claims.

cmauger@detroitnews.com