Callie Barr is challenging every signature the Lorinser campaign procured from Jan. 2023 to Oct. 2023.
There is no 180-day shelf life on Partisan Nominating Petitions. Barr incorrectly references a requirement for Nonpartisan Qualifying Petitions or candidacies without party affiliation. The statute does not apply to Democratic Congressional primaries.
Barr challenges a signer by claiming they are deceased.
The voter is alive and registered to vote. They recently voted in February. Their voter information is accurate and up-to-date with the Secretary of State. They are not deceased. Barr's claim is patently false.
Barr challenges a signature by claiming that Acme is a county, not a township.
Barr is incorrect. Acme is a township in Grand Traverse County, not a county.
Barr challenges an address using an election code that would claim Escanaba isn't a city in Delta County.
Barr is unequivocally wrong. Escanaba is in Delta County.
Barr mistakenly asserts that abbreviating location names is not permitted.
According to the election code, standard abbreviations, e.g., MQT and TC, are allowed.
Barr claims that residents who live on islands, e.g. Sugar Island, are "not registered" because their entries included the name of their island township.
Island townships are just as valid as inland townships.
Barr is challenging entire sheets because, according to her, the circulator's signature and printed name included different middle initials.
The printed name has a printed initial, and the signature uses a cursive version. The letters are identifiably the same.
Barr highlights minor date discrepancies, claiming some signers added "20" in front of "24" to correct the date-year to "2024". She's challenging these individual entries because they did not initial these alleged modifications.
According to petition instructions, circulators are encouraged to ask signers to fill in omissions. The election code does not instruct writing an initial.
Barr challenges every signer who included their township and city because the address field asks for the township or the city.
The corresponding election code instructs signers, "Do not write the county and the city/township." By including their city and township, signers offered more information about their address but did not provide prohibited information, such as their county.
Barr falsely claims some signers were not registered voters.
For most, Barr appears to be using an unofficial flawed database. To the best of its ability, the Lorinser campaign validated official registration statuses with the Secretary of State and discarded any known unregistered voters before filing. Most of these signatures have no discernible reason to be challenged.
Barr is challenging some signers for illegible handwriting.
Petition law states that an individual's unique signature does not need to be legible; only their information does. If the information had been illegible, the Lorinser campaign would not have been able to verify their registration, and it verified these nominators and their addresses.
Barr's challenge includes a complaint that Lorinser gathered over the maximum of 2,000 signatures.
The Lorinser campaign knowingly and willfully only gathered the maximum number of signatures. Lorinser discarded any received above that quantity, and records clearly show his total official submission was below the maximum.
Barr contends that circulators restarted writing their address lines after crossing out their own mistakes. She is challenging entire pages of signatures because the circulator didn't initial those strikethroughs.
These are not infractions. There isn't even an appropriate code to reference the claim. Initialing strikethroughs may be expected in contracts between two parties, but no code or law states that electors need to initial strikethroughs on nominating petitions.
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