Planned Parenthood announced that they began collecting signatures for their abortion amendment on Sunday, March 6.
Though not legally required, the form of their petition was not pre-approved by the Michigan Board of State Canvassers. Their original petition form was rejected on February 11 by the Board for including a logo with text that was too small and didn’t conform to state election law.
That delay could be a critical obstacle to their goals. They need to collect 425,059 valid signatures from Michigan votes by July 11 in order for their petition to appear on the November ballot. That means they will have 127 days to collect signatures, and they need well more than 425,059 to succeed, since even well-run petition drives have significant numbers of invalid signatures.
If they collect at least 500,000 signatures, that’s nearly 4,000 signatures a day—more than 27,000 a week. It is likely that Planned Parenthood and the ACLU will require using paid circulators to collect the bulk of their signatures. However, they have scheduled several volunteer trainings and kickoff events in the second half of March.
Citizens to Support MI Women and Children will continue working to encourage people to decline to sign and prepare for a fight at the ballot box in November—if this extreme abortion amendment is able to gather enough signatures.
Have you seen their petition being circulated somewhere? Let us know using our Petition Circulator Tip Line chat bot.