The group that’s trying to keep a referendum on Michigan’s emergency manager law off the November ballot has taken its case to the state Supreme Court.
There are two issues here. One is whether the ballot committee that wants to repeal the law complied with a rule about how petitions are printed. State election law says part of the petition must be printed in 14-point type. There’s a dispute over how that should be measured..
The second issue is whether a technicality like font size is enough to keep a question off the ballot after more than 200 thousand people signed petitions.
A legal precedent says as long as a campaign has mostly complied with the law, the question should go to voters. The referendum’s opponents want the state Supreme Court to overturn that precedent.