Thirty-Seven Words: An analysis of the petition process and the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative by Diane Carey

THIRTY-SEVEN WORDS
An analysis of the petition process and
the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative

by Diane Carey
RaceFreeZone.com and MCRI petition circulator



Despite losing court challenge after court challenge, opponents of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) continue to accuse MCRI’s workers and volunteers of “widespread and systematic racially-targeted fraud” to gather enough signatures to put the measure on the 2006 ballot. Though these charges have never been substantiated, they are accepted carte blanche by many officials who should be objective and deal with facts, but instead are driven by personal political motives. Even judges who have ruled time after time in favor of MCRI lower their brows and give lip service to “disturbing allegations,” yet have no evidence to cite. From the courtroom to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission to the Board of Canvassers, MCRI prevails despite undisguised, calcified biases against it by these persons who have sworn oaths to protect everyone’s rights. The media then lead with the part of the MCRI story that is least substantiated--the politically motivated mantra--but never demand proof. “Alleged” does not mean “true.”
Charges of vague language, code words, and undisclosed effects persist in a constant drumbeat from One United Michigan, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), and other detractors. Their shrill attacks have garnered much media attention, but little cold scrutiny. In the law, though, certain words mean specific things. Law is different from common lingo.
Radical opponents are not only tarring the mission with unproven allegations, but they are tarring me---personally. I was among the most pro-active petition circulators for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. I contacted hundreds of registered voters by phone, sent out more than 1500 petitions, each with 15 spaces for signatures. Those people acted as circulators for their own families, friends, churches, offices, and neighbors, then either returned the completed petitions to me or sent them directly to the Lansing collection point. Assuming that these petitions were half-full on average, I can make an educated guess that I helped gather at least 3000 and possibly as many as 10,500 signatures. I resent and refute the accusations of “fraud.”

REPEAT A LIE OFTEN ENOUGH . . .

The modern movement to treat Americans without regard to race or gender began in California 1997 with Proposition 209, after University of California Trustee Ward Connerly discovered that the University was using racial and gender criteria for admissions and employment, despite its credo of “equal opportunity without regard to race or gender.” Initiative 200 passed in Washington State in 1998. Similar executive orders were enacted in Florida and Texas. In 2006 Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, enjoyed a landslide victory after a venomous campaign by its opponents. More than 25% of the U. S. population now lives in preference-free states. But did the citizens of these states understand what they were voting upon?
Opponents claim that the language of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is designed to “hoodwink”, that the title is itself deceptive, and that “widespread fraud and deceit” were used to collect the signatures. They claim specially trained paid signature gatherers infiltrated centers of dense black population like Detroit and Flint, telling black voters that MCRI would “protect civil rights” or “protect affirmative action,” and thus that black signers were duped into helping end racial preferences.
Where is the evidence? Hearsay is not evidence. A political tactic is not evidence. Persistent accusations are not evidence.
TO HIRE OR NOT TO HIRE
Were some signature gatherers paid? Yes. In the American political system, the sponsor of a ballot initiative assembles both volunteer and paid signature gatherers in order to succeed within the time limit. There’s nothing corrupt about this cottage industry that offers piecemeal employment to itinerant workers who want temp jobs. Some supporters donate time, while some donate money so others can be hired to do the work. The hired workers represent supporters who gave money. Money donations are free speech at work. All circulators act independently, can’t possibly be individually monitored, and may or may not represent the petition accurately. This is why every adult knows not to sign something he or she has not read or doesn’t understand. In any contract, the final responsibility lies with the person signing his or her name. People must read.
Since poll after poll showed Michigan voters in favor of ending race and gender preferences, why would any gatherer bother to lie about it?
BAMN’s website claims that paid gatherers “systematically” targeted black voters. They have never explained why anybody would deliberately target blacks. Are they saying blacks are collectively too stupid to read 37 little words before signing a legal document? Talk about racist insults!
Opponents have also complained that some of the signature gatherers in Detroit were themselves black. How is this a problem? Are they saying blacks lied to other blacks just for pay? Should the campaign have not hired blacks? The hiring was as race-neutral as the premise. What would BAMN and OUM say if there had been no black circulators?
However, I and my family and friends who circulated the petitions were all volunteers. The 1500+ petitions I mobilized were circulated without pay, as were thousands more in the state. Should voluntary efforts be rendered null by flimsy accusations? Since we were not paid, there was no motivation other than our own personal philosophies. This high-energy grassroots success has been ignored by the opponents, by the complicit bureaucrats and even by the hostile judges who have been unable to find a legal way to stop our organic groundswell.
Why would I work so hard for this? Am I a racist? Am I against women?
My grandparents were Assyrian immigrants. I’m a mother with a multi-race family. I have a white daughter, a white son, and a son adopted from Guatemala. I have a niece and three nephews who are half-black. My daughter is a financial analyst, my nieces involved in sports, and one is studying sports medicine at MSU. I don’t want my children divided by race, or told they have different rights from their own siblings and cousins. They are Americans, equal before the law. It’s that simple.
BAMN’s website says, “The actual effect of this proposal would be to exclude the majority of fully qualified black, Latina/o and Native American students from admission to the University of Michigan and other colleges and universities in our state.”
If these applicants are “fully qualified” and race is not a factor, why would they be excluded?
And why would I work so hard to exclude my own son, niece and nephews from higher education? Maybe something else is going on.

THE TRAINING SESSION

I attended the Lansing training session for signature gatherers. The session was a dry, non-political seminar on a legal process and how to avoid mistakes such as using birthdates instead of the date of signing. Use black ink. Do not sign the circulator’s name until after the petition is complete. Send it to this address. Have people read the language, or read it to them.
Never were we told to get signatures “by any means necessary.” In fact, we were encouraged to explain fully that the initiative affected only State government education, hiring or contracts.
In Mid-Michigan, I sent out multiple press releases, wrote op-eds explaining the initiative, was interviewed by newspapers and TV stations, spoke on several talk radio shows, addressed gatherings, was a panelist in debates all over the state, and engaged in every possible effort to publicize the facts of MCRI. I even started a blog called RaceFreeZone.com and loaded it with facts, analysis and research, including quotations by many black scholars and race relations experts. If this is fraud, I’m lousy at it.

37 LITTLE WORDS

BAMN’s website says, “The ‘Michigan Civil Rights Initiative’ is a fraud. The entire effort is an attempt to hoodwink the population of Michigan. The rightwing wishes to sugarcoat the poison by calling it a ‘civil rights initiative’ when its aim is to overturn the laws and the programs that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s secured in Michigan.”
Let’s have a look at what the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative actually says, right out in the open:

THE MICHIGAN CIVIL RIGHTS INITIATIVE PETITION LANGUAGE
The State shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin, if such discrimination or segregation is or purports to be required by any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, rule, or order of a State or any agency of political subdivision thereof.


These initiatives are named “Civil Rights” initiatives because they are modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Civil rights do not belong to any group or race. We all have civil rights.
If MCRI secretly aims to overturn the Civil Rights movement, why does it so closely mirror the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Maybe something else is going on.

BY ANY OTHER NAME . . .

After losing their fight to deny the people of Michigan our right to vote on this initiative, opponents went after the actual wording. They claimed that “preferential treatment” is a code phrase to avoid saying “affirmative action.” If so, then the Civil Rights Act of 1964 engages the same “code.” There is no mention of affirmative action in the Act.
Ultimately the Bureau of Elections caved and changed the ballot wording to this:

A PROPOSAL TO AMEND THE STATE CONSTITUTION TO BAN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS THAT GIVE PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT TO GROUPS OR INDIVIDUALS BASED ON THEIR RACE, GENDER, COLOR, ETHNICITY OR NATIONAL ORIGIN FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION OR CONTRACTING PURPOSES.
This language is not that of the actual state constitutional amendment. The amendment itself reads exactly as the petition language reads, so what was the point of changing it on the ballot? The addition of “affirmative action programs” was forced in on the assumption that voters would support and defend “affirmative action.” Would they?
The phrase “affirmative action” is legally undefined, therefore hard to interpret in law. It was coined by President John F. Kennedy on January 9, 1961: “The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.” (emphasis added)
“Without regard” means that race, creed, color or national origin must carry no influence for special treatment, for or against a person.
President Lyndon Johnson later revised Kennedy’s phrase into meaning the exact opposite of Kennedy’s intents. In 1965 Executive Order 11246 required federal contractors to “take affirmative action” to employ minorities and to document those efforts. President Richard Nixon later added “goals and timetables” to “increase minority employment.” With two strokes of the executive pen, Johnson and Nixon had invented racial quotas. This upside-down version became the common interpretation of affirmative action: unearned rewards based on race. Gender was added in 1967.
The result has been a decades-long scramble to define “minority,” a feeding frenzy of “front” businesses with token 51% minority of female “owners,” billions of dollars poured into remedial training sinkholes, separate college admissions pools, and uncounted minority students boosted into colleges beyond their academic skills, counted as “diversity in admissions,” only to flunk out and be forgotten, rather than attending colleges better matched to them and actually graduating. This applies to everybody—I would fail at Harvard, but I know better than to go there.
But what else does “affirmative action” mean? Is it based on race or on economic disadvantage? Or based on sex? Does it apply to poor whites? Does it apply to rich blacks? Does race trump gender? Can a millionaire woman get it just by being a woman? Is a poor white boy rejected while a wealthy boy claiming he’s 1/32nd Cherokee gets a boost? Will there be affirmative action DNA tests--in America? What if the white boy is in a wheelchair? Do recently immigrated Hispanics get more favors than Hispanics who were born here? Does it mean money? Does it mean tokenism? Quotas? A place at the head of the line? Does it mean 20 free points in a college admissions test? Does it mean “no whites need apply”? Do Asians get it, or are they too successful on their own? How does it choose between a Pacific-rim woman and a Puerto Rican man? Or is it only for those whose ancestors were oppressed on American soil? If so, why are foreign millionaires coming here and getting juicy contracts based on “minority” status? Do Eskimos get it even though they were never oppressed? Were blacks historically more “oppressed” than Chinese railroad workers, imported sex slaves or Irish paupers? Does a black from Morocco count just by being black? What exactly is “affirmative action”?
The truth is that no one knows. The term has never been legally defined. It is an amorphous colloquialism, meaning something different to each person. Forcing “affirmative action” into the ballot language may have actually helped get MCRI approved in the general election, because people used their own imaginations to define it.
The movements to ban race/gender-based preferences mean what they say: the state governments may not prefer or reject based upon physical features or nationality. Not all affirmative action is banned, as BAMN and OUM insist. There is zero effect on economic-based affirmative action; poor people of all colors can get help. There is zero effect on health programs; there’s nothing in the language about health care. There is no effect on privately managed race- or gender-based affirmative action programs, schools, scholarships, businesses or hiring. For legal purposes, “preference” is actually the more accurate term.

BY THE NUMBERS

The MCRI petition needed 313,757 signatures to qualify for appearance on the ballot. The petition campaign collected 508,282 signatures, submitted January 6, 2005, more than any other ballot initiative in Michigan’s history.

7/13/2005 - Public record: The Secretary of State Staff Report
concludes that 455,373 of the 505,970 facially-valid signatures
(or 90%) submitted by MCRI are from registered voters. The
Staff Report concludes through the random sampling technique
that there is greater than a 99.9% chance that MCRI has enough
signatures (317,757) to qualify, requiring that the initiative be
certified.

According to the law, certification was required. Frantic challengers wanted the law to do their dirty work, but didn’t mind ignoring the law when it suited them. They suddenly declared that “as many as” 125, 000 signatures may have been gathered from black people who were told that MCRI “protects affirmative action” or “protects civil rights.” Where did they get this number? In no court case or venue were they able to field more than a few dozen after-the-fact testimonials, numbering somewhere between 160 and 200—the number is never the same. Several are from people who never signed and could not prove they were approached. There is no basis for the wildly imaginary number of 125,000.
But let’s entertain the fanciful. Let’s throw out every possible black signature, including those who signed willingly because they want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. If we subtract 125,000 from the 505,970 signatures accepted as “valid,” there are still 380,970 signatures; 90% of that number is 342,873 – still well over the required 313,757. This is not imaginary.
That’s 342,873 people whose civil rights are being ignored by those who claim fraud which they cannot prove. Dare I say “disenfranchised”?

ONE WOMAN’S POLL

Frustrated by persistent accusations of fraud or misunderstanding, I pulled out my partial list of circulators and signatories, and phoned all over the state at random—Fenton, Flint, Traverse City, Zeeland, Pontiac, Eastpointe, and more. “Remember that petition to stop the state from choosing between us by race and gender?” I asked. “Did you comprehend the meaning and goals?”
I called 111 signers and 17 circulators. Every single one had comprehended the petition language and signed willingly. Because I deal with hard evidence, I asked for original-signature statements attesting to their understanding of the initiative.
Not one person turned me down. I can easily get more. I now have “testimonials” of a comparable number to those collected by opponents, which they call “evidence of fraud.” I have evidence that there was not fraud. I invite all media to investigate.

“I read it. I understood it. Now let me vote on it.”
Patty Alspach
Michigan voter

Those half-million-plus signatures did not change the law. If the people of Michigan had believed the language unclear or that fraud existed, there was a second chance to reject MCRI: the election of November 2006. The amendment passed by a resounding 58-42% margin, with “Yes” votes from a secure 2,141,010 voters during a very left-leaning election. The result debunked assumptions that MCRI is strictly a conservative, libertarian, right wing or Republican plot. Even people who always or occasionally vote Democrat declared, “Yes, we understand. Race and gender affirmative action is wrong. Americans should be equal before the law.” The victory cut across racial lines, party lines, age lines and gender lines. These results also destroyed the wistful dream that the California and Washington State elections were somehow just mistakes.

JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
The claim that MCRI is awash in fraud is itself an orchestrated artifice. Opponents lie from the hip about the initiative’s intent and impact, saying that MCRI is against equal opportunity—in fact, it guarantees equal opportunity. Affirmative action is the opposite of equal opportunity. They insist that MCRI prohibits gender-specific health programs like cervical cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer screenings. Nonsense. No such program has been stopped in California or Washington State, as proven by both states’ official websites. Public gender-based health and education programs are alive and well. Check the Sally Ride program at Berkeley. It’s still there.
Jobs that depend on gender, like female undercover police officers, are not affected, as the opposition claims. Women’s and girls’ sports programs are not affected, as the opposition claims. Pay equity for women, fair housing and lending programs for women and minorities are not affected, as the opposition claims.
Opponents invented wilder claims as they became more desperate, including one completely off-the-wall scare tactic that MCRI would affect the adoption of special-needs children (on the Norm Jones Show, Talk 580). Go back and read the actual language. I am an adoptive mother. Why would I support anything that would hinder adoption?
Maybe there’s something else going on . . .
Maybe the “widespread and systematic fraud” is on the other foot.