A proposed state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion in Michigan was blocked from appearing on ballots this November after an elections board deadlocked in a vote on whether it could be included.
The vote came down along strict party lines with the opposition claiming the amendment as written was “gibberish” and “unreadable.” Why? Because of some spacing issues in the text.
You can see for yourself just how ludicrousthat claim is:
The Republicans on the Board of State Canvassers voted not to allow the provision on the ballot because of …
— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) September 1, 2022
spacing errors.
You read that correctly. No missing words. No wrong words. No doubt about what the amendment would do.
Some missing spaces. pic.twitter.com/9R3BdfExpQ
What makes this move from the Board of Canvassers even more infuriating is that this amendment was massively popular with voters. The Michigan organization Reproductive Freedom for All got hundreds of thousands more signatures than they needed to have their measure appear on the ballot—close to a million signatures all together. The increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court has overturned federal constitutional protections for abortions and decided this should be an issue returned to the states, except the states are doing everything in their power to still keep voters from having a say in the matter.
There is now a chance for the Michigan Supreme Court to overturn the canvassers’ ruling but any pretense that anti-abortion advocates think this is an issue that should be left up to the states—to the people of those states—is officially dead.
When Republicans claim they want to return abortion to “the people,” please remember that Michigan Republicans are trying to stop the people from voting on abortion because of a few meaningless typos. https://t.co/b0FLlndCAk
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 1, 2022
It’s also worth noting that in one major county in Kansas, the recent anti-abortion amendment voters overwhelmingly defeated contained multiple typos. Not just a few spaces missing, but actual misspelled words. That amendment, which was already filled with deliberately confusing language, tried to regulate abortion based on the “circumstnces” of “pregnacy.”
The election commissioner in that battleground county declared that the misspellings of key words did “not change the meaning of the ballot question or its intent.”
And yet the New York Times decided to frame the Michigan typos as an “embarrassing blow to abortion rights supporters.”
Are you effing kidding me with the framing of this story pic.twitter.com/B5oMJoYcoe
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) September 1, 2022
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has proven many times over to be overwhelmingly unpopular. Across parties, in every state, more people support access to abortion than oppose it. And yet this continues to be an uphill battle, thanks to power-crazy state officials who are vehemently opposed to both abortion access and voting rights (and the two are inextricably linked) and major media outlets eager for whatever reason to keep carrying their water.
(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
