I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The state of Michigan does routine checks of their voter registration lists and removes people from the state’s Qualified Voter File based on those checks. Most of the time, there’s a good reason for those removals but often someone is removed from the rolls unjustifiably. The Advancement Project has put together a database where you can check to see if your registration may have been removed in the most recent process of voter removal.
The voter’s rights organization continues to challenge the legality of such removal programs and has filed papers to add a new plaintiff to an ongoing lawsuit over the issue. A press release tells the story of this new plaintiff, Lisa Blehm:
After registering to vote in Michigan in 2006 using her home address in Standish, Blehm temporarily relocated to Georgia in 2007 to join her husband, a Marine who had been temporarily deployed there. While in Georgia, Blehm obtained a driver’s license, but specifically declined to register to vote in the state, because she fully intended to maintain her permanent residency and voting status in Standish. Around June 2008, after her husband’s assignment in Georgia was complete, Blehm and her husband returned to their home and permanent residence in Michigan.
Then on Nov. 4, 2008, Blehm went to her assigned polling place at Standish City Hall to vote, only to be refused by a poll worker, who told her that she was not registered to vote and would not be able to vote in the election. In addition, despite the explicit requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and the Michigan Election Law, the poll worker did not offer Blehm the opportunity to cast a provisional ballot.
“Lisa’s story is a prime example of how Michigan’s unlawful purging programs have devastating real-world consequences,” said Bradley Heard, senior attorney with Advancement Project. “The state and city election officials’ actions in this case are blatant violations of the NVRA and HAVA, and those officials should be held accountable for those actions by the courts.”
NVRA is the National Voting Rights Act; HAVA is the Help America Vote Act.
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