LANSING – The state Board of State Canvassers voted 3-1 Thursday against certifying a petition to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and bring tipped workers up to that wage in an unexpected bipartisan vote.
People Protecting Michigan Jobs, which opposes the petition, made its case to the board that the petition should not go to the ballot because it lacked a sufficient amount of legal signatures.
The group behind the proposal, Raise Michigan, submitted 319,641 signatures and the staff of the Bureau of Elections, after vetting those signatures, determined an estimated 259,776 were valid signatures from registered voters, barely more than the 258,088 minimum needed. But People Protecting Michigan Jobs said it found 82 duplicate signatures in the sample of 2,731 signatures the bureau drew to analyze the proposal?s eligibility to go before the Legislature, putting it below the minimum needed.
Board members spent hours going through the signatures looking for duplicates before reaching their decision.
Raise Michigan could challenge the decision in court, but the bipartisan loss casts a major cloud on its chances of prevailing. Had Raise Michigan succeeded in getting its proposal certified, it would have gone to the Legislature, which presumably would not have acted on it, leading to the measure going on the November ballot.
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