The Michigan attorney general’s office is preparing to look into potential election fraud within Michigan Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter’s campaign after large numbers of the signatures turned in by the campaign were ruled invalid. “We will review information provided by the Secretary of State and determine whether additional action is warranted,” said a Joy Yearout, a spokeswoman for Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette. McCotter, who briefly waged a long shot bid for the GOP presidential nomination last year, has failed to qualify for the ballot and announced Tuesday that he will wage a write-in campaign in the primary.At the root of that failure to qualify were more than a thousand invalid signatures. Just 244 of the more than 2,000 signatures submitted by McCotter’s campaign wound up being valid, according to the local CBS station and MIRS. While campaigns will often have some signatures invalidated, the sheer number of signatures that were thrown out suggests that people who collected them may have engaged in fraud.
A Detroit News review of the signatures found some of the pages were photocopied once or twice and attached to the name of a different signature gatherer. McCotter wrote a column Tuesday in the Detroit News saying he will press on with a write-in bid and urging the state attorney general’s office to investigate.
“In honoring my vow to put my official responsibilities before politics, I delegated the same team that gathered signatures for me during the past decade to do so again, and I had no reason to doubt the competence or credibility of our petition gatherers’ assessment,” McCotter said, adding: “Now I feel like George Bailey after Uncle Billy admitted he lost the money. Like George, knowing my misplaced trust has negatively impacted so many people is heartrending. Unlike George, I am not tempted to jump off a bridge. Instead, I remember my late father’s rule: ‘You clean up your own mess.’”(Give McCotter this: He’s retained his legendarily wry sense of humor.)
Full Article: Thad McCotter’s problems mount – The Washington Post.