Democracy is only democracy when it agrees with recallers

Friday, September 03, 2010
Andrew Heller | Flint Journal

Come Heller high water…

•How in the world did we get to September so fast? I still haven’t bought suntan lotion or run through a sprinkler yet, for crying out loud. And why is it that even if you’ve been out of school for 30 years, you still view the start of the school year as the official end of summer even though the calendar says that doesn’t actually happen for three weeks?

•David “The Human Recall Machine” Davenport is upset that the city and county clerks threw out nearly 7,000 of the signatures he and his cronies collected to try and force a recall election of Flint Mayor Dayne Walling because they didn’t match the signatures on voter registration cards. The recall campaign issued a statement saying that’s “not how democracy is supposed to work.”

•But from my reading of state law, they’re wrong: “Signature comparisons shall be made with the digitized signature in the qualified voter file. If the qualified voter file does not contain a digitized signature of an elector, the official with whom the recall petition was filed shall compare the challenged signature to the signature on the master card.”

Quibble with the judgment call on the similarity or lack thereof between the signatures if you like, Dave, but how is democracy not working here?

Read the rest of the column here at Mlive.

Paid for by
Friends of Dayne Walling
P.O. Box 937
Flint, MI  48501

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