Ballot Proposals: Good news and bad news

First the bad news: the “Stop Over Spending” proposal appears headed for the ballot - at least according to Matt Ferguson of MichiganLiberal.com. Ferguson, who was there while the petitions were being delivered, observes:

No word yet on whether Grover Norquist will actually be moving to Michigan to help with the SOS campaign effort. If he does, he may have a hard go of it - everyone from the Guv to the Chamber to Tim Skubick is against this stupid idea.

As for the good news: The right of women to control their own bodies is safe for the time being.

A group that wants to make abortion illegal in Michigan did not collect enough signatures to qualify its issue for the November ballot.

Michigan Citizens for Life needed to turn in at least 317,757 signatures of valid state voters to elections officials by Monday. The group likely collected fewer than 300,000 signatures, organizers said.

The group wants to change the state constitution to legally define a person as existing from the moment of conception. If successful, the initiative could have sparked a legal challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

In other news: a proposal to abolish the State Senate also failed to qualify for ballot status.

For a list of possible ballot issues and their status (as of June 12), check out this PDF file from the Michigan Secretary of State’s office. There could be as many as nine ballot proposals on the ballot. Wow. That’s about as many as we saw in 2000, 2002, and 2004 combined.

Speaking of which: Remember the failed school voucher scheme of 2000? Remember who sponsored it? Yup, Dick and Betsy DeVos. Be sure to check out this article also on MichLib regarding the DeVos’s support for vouchers.