Left off Ballot, Dearborn Resident Files Grievance
A candidate for Dearborn mayor whose petitions were ruled invalid has filed a grievance with the elections commission requesting reconsideration in the matter.
The Dearborn Clerk’s office ruled last week that some of the signatures on Ziad Abdulhamid Abdulmalik’s petition were invalid, which automatically made him ineligible to run for Dearborn mayor. He is now asking that the decision be reconsidered.
The City Clerk’s office will meet with election commission officials next week to discuss a variety of matters, including the request by Abdulmalik. According to the clerk’s office, a number of the signatures on Abdulmalik’s petition did not match the signatures the clerk’s office keeps on file of all registered voters in Dearborn.
The Clerk’s office took similar action with Doug Thomas, who submitted petitions for both city council and mayor. His petition for council was deemed valid but his mayoral one was thrown out because a number of the signatures were from people who are not registered voters in Dearborn, which is a requirement. Apparently either Thomas or his supporters overlooked that tiny detail as a number of the signatures on his mayoral petition were from Dearborn Heights residents.
Of course, the drama of not having the required amount of signatures to run for mayor could have been avoided by both Thomas and Abdulmalik. Had the candidates turned in their petitions ahead of the deadline, they would have had time to actually go back out and get the proper signatures from registered Dearborn voters to make their petitions valid before the time ran out.
As it stands now, Dearborn Mayor John B. O’Reilly, Jr., will face just one challenger, Michael J. Prus, in the November general election.
May 17th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
It’s really nice that this guy thinks he is entitled to special treatment. Apparently he thinks he is better than the rest of the candidates for office who are required to comply with the law. Does Mr. Abdulmalik realize that if they make an exception for him, everyone else would be entitled to one, too? When will this stop and who will pay for this? There are laws and rules established in advance so that everyone is treated objectively and equally; if you can’t or don’t intend on complying, don’t run for office. Better yet, move to Detroit; no wait, this won’t help because Ms. Winfrey, the City of Detroit Clerk, won’t put up with this either!
May 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Typical Doug Thomas. Hope you blow the council chance also, so we can finally say good-bye to you, once and for all.
May 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
OK maybe I’m missing something here. The city clerk has on file your signature for comparison purposes. So when you sign a pitition shouldn’t you know that it is going to be compared. Also doesn’t the candidate know this also. My quetion is why would you sign it different than when you sign your sample, or better yet why woudn’t the candidate advise the signer to sign like the sample submitted to the clerks office? Again am I missing something.
Don’t banks do this for check signing too? or are we just becoming a dumb-down society.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Once again, enough is enough! How in the heck could Mr. Z. A. A. expect to be considered a serious candidate for mayor when he can’t even follow the simple rules and guidelines to get on the ballot to begin with?
May 19th, 2009 at 12:49 am
first of all. i do not use the same signature for everything. anyways, ziad went to the city clerk and told her that the three signatures that you think i plagarized can be confirmed by those people. he told the city clerk that he was going to bring in those people to comfirm that they signed his petition and kathy buda the city clerk said she doesnt care. how are the plagarized when those people can come in and comfirm that they signed. no one is allowed to sign there name in a different way, i have never heard that before. kathy buda should get fired. i hope he sues dearborn. i hate o’rilley, he does nothing. VOTE FOR ZIAD
May 19th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Fordson, you and Mr. A apparently don’t think you are bound by the same rules as everyone else. Again, either you have the proper signatures or you don’t; otherwise, everyone else who didn’t have enough signatures because of the same problem or any other problem would also use this argument. Where does it end? So I can go ahead and sign my friends’ names to my petition and they’ll later confirm it was actually their signatures later, because they are my friends? Are you actually arguing this? The rules are established in advance BY LAW and they use an object standard, i.e. the person’s signature; there is always a variance allowed, but it is my understanding that the signatures which Mr. A submitted weren’t even close! You and whoever else agrees with you should not sign petitions and should not run for office if you can’t comply. Perhaps at this point, individuals should be reminded about the penalties for voter fraud, instead? Your and Mr. Abdulmalik’s suggestion that you entitled to special treatment and should not be held to the same standards and rules as everyone else should speak LOUDLY as to how you and he intend to conduct yourselves if ever elected to any office. Dearborn, please consider this carefully when voting!
May 19th, 2009 at 11:26 am
first of all Dearbornette, they werent his friends signatures. one of the signatures that they said can be forged was a signature from the principle of fordson high school. do you think that ziad is dum enough to forge the signature of the principle of a high school. they can easily find this person and find out if he forged it. the principle said he would come in to city hall and say he signed the petition but the city clerk again said she does not care. how is that fair. who does she think she is. how stupid is that. i bet you o’reily and kathy buda never even did there petitions, but who is gonna stop them. HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS IS A FORGED SIGNATURE WHEN THE PRINCIPLE SAYS HIMSELF THAT IT WAS HIS SIGNATURE.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:30 am
city hall is doing whatever they can to keep ziad out of the race. they just want o’reily to run and win easily without a race. o’reilly sucks and hes making dearborn suck. he thinks hes guido. get this guy o’reilly out of here. where did this guy come from
May 19th, 2009 at 11:44 am
i signed the petition with a different signature. i used my sloppy signature and for my licence and my registration i used a neat signature. how are they gonna deny my sinature when i went in there and said i signed it. its time to sue city hall and file a comlaint against the city clerk. im gonna run for city clerk now.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
The United States Courts have determined that each person can have ONE signature that is theirs. It is your responsibility to sign your name the same everytime. It is the law. Ignorance is no excuse.
Again though there are people-mostly in E Dearborn who dont think they have to follow the rules, they can just claim they were picked on. Follow the rules and the law and you will have no problems.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Wow, Fordson, where do I begin? The law was drafted and the Sec of State’s database was compiled to make everything a ‘no-brainer’ and to “objectify” the process; in the old days, the voter registration cards all had to be pulled to verify the signatures. Can you imagine that if 100+ applicants were running, like in Detroit? It would take forever. Again, you don’t explain why you and your candidate should not be bound by these same rules to which everyone else is bound; you are not stating that the clerk’s office did not use their on-file signatures. Instead you are arguing that you should be able to have as many signatures as you want to sign on important documents. Are you allowed to sign your credit card receipts this way? Does the bank allow you to sign your signature any way you want when you withdraw money or sign loan documents? Do you sign legal documents such as deeds, mortgages, or wills with all different signatures, too? Wow, this is really starting to sound extremely complicated, something that the laws were designed to prevent!
Can you imagine that if everyone who submitted their petitions in Dearborn (up to 200 signatures for each candidate) had signers with different signatures on the petitions than on record and then demanded the special attention which Ziad and you are demanding? We would have over 3500 people down at City Hall having to “testify” about their alleged signatures.
I am not a huge fan of the current mayor (nor was I of the last), nor am I a huge fan of the current clerk. It seems these days I never have anyone to vote for that I am truly satisfied with; however, I would sure support someone who follows the law and rules over someone who does not. By the way, the mayor was the council president for many years prior, or didn’t you know that, either?
I support people who enforce the law and treat all equally, which in this case they are trying to do; laws and rules set in advance benefit all, because they encourage equal treatment for all. By the way, unless the clerk’s office has a vacancy, the only way you can get her “fired” is if all the voters “fire” her by not voting her back in, or in the unlikely event of a recall. And, you are going to have to wait another 4 years to run for clerk, as you missed the primary deadline. (Or don’t you think you have to comply with that, either?)
Maybe you and Ziad are the ones that need to leave. Or, in the alternative, suck it up, chalk it up to experience and get your guy’s proper signatures in next time well in advance. Who knows, Dearborn might just be looking at another mayor in 8 years.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Let’s just throw the file cards away and delete the Secretary of State ditigal signatures. Because according to Fordson thay have no purpose anyway! Let’s do away with the primary too! Hold a general election and all the voters can just vote for who ever they want and the candidate with the most votes wins.
Oh by the way Fordson good luck, because at this time you will have to run as a write-in candidate and you’re going to have to convince the electorate that you’re more qualified; and ,just by your grammar and spelling you’re going to have to do a lot of campaigning by August.
May 19th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Oh Fordson, don’t tease me, bro. Buda will squash you like a spoiled kumquat. Your posts are farcical, at best. Pretty typical that Ehmad Fadlallah be involved, though. Cousins, lawsuits, forged signatures…same old crap for decades now….go ahead, call 911…WAIT, belay that recommendation….call ACCESS…
May 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Okay, I don’t get it. Isn’t the number of signatures needed to be placed on the ballot rediculously low? I don’t know the actual number required but a few weekends out in front of the local grocery store ought to do it, right? And if someone is that committed to running for office, that doesn’t seem like such a hardship.
We all know that you can’t bank on every signature being valid (correct me if I’m wrong, but an invalid signature does not invalidate the entire petition, only if it reduces the number of valid signatures to below the required amout). So if you need 100 signatures, you get 150. Big deal. If you can only barely get the required number of people – valid or not – to sign your petition, then getting bounced by invalid signatures is your own fault. Shut up and go away.
Grrr.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Here is another fact worth noting: Mr. Abdulmalik turned in his petitions minutes before the 4 p.m. May 12 filing deadline with only a few more than the necessary 100 signatures. If he had arrived earlier, or (gasp), turned them in a day prior he would have had time to go out and collect the extra signatures after the initial ones were invalidated. This is something that I am willing to bet a clerk’s office employee told him.
May 20th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I don’t mean to sound crazy, but in the interests of democracy, doesn’t it seem reasonable to have some sort of appeals process for signatures that are deemed invalid? And if someone sign an affidavit (or testifies), under penalty of perjury, saying that he/she did in fact sign the petition, shouldn’t we allow the signatures?
Shouldn’t we always err on the side of upholding voters’ rights? What interest could we possibly serve by disallowing valid signatures that might look a little different than what is on file?
Certifying authentic signatures that were submitted by the deadline is NOT special treatment, it is equal treatment. We have appeals processes because we do not always ASSUME equal treatment. Sometimes it takes a little more to get equal treatment, especially in a place like Dearborn, where the FBI is already keeping a close eye.
And this veiled anti-Arab racist talk is kind of disgusting, too. If you don’t like Arabs, just come out and say it already. Cloaking your racism just insults the intelligence.
Amer Zahr
May 20th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
I would like to know if the Secretary of State or the Clerk’s office employes a questioned documents examiner to determine if the sigatures did not come from the same person. What are the qualifications of the person or persons who declared the signatures invalid? If they are not experts in questioned documents examination, we have problem.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Having collected petition signatures for candidates, I believe the time has come to do away with this system because the burden of proof lies with the candidate and the petition circulators and the manner used to verify signatures is subjective. If I am in a hurry, my signature certainly looks different than it does if I am at leisure. Or, in some cases, I have signed a petition without a clipboard behind it, and so it looks shaky. Add to that the number of people who will lie about being registered voters. I recall there were even members of a commission appointed by the late mayor to determine salaries of the mayor, clerk, and council, who were not registered to vote–prominent names, too.
Can someone explain the point in this day and age of having to collect signatures? Why can’t a candidate simply run for office?
May 20th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Maybe the city clerk can answer some of these ?’s. What were the reasons for disqualifying the signatures? Maybe your explaination will clear alot of this up.
If you’re reading Deep’s blog, we would like to hear from you.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Amer, seriously, lighten up. Not everything is racist. If Ziad was really serious about running he wouldn’t have waited until the last minute to turn in his petition. This way had there been questionable signatures he could have gone out and gotten new ones. A serious candidate would have done that because he/she would want to make sure they would be on the ballot. Why do you think the idiot Thomas waited until the last minute to turn in his mayoral petition. He knew full well there were errors with it. Notice his council petition was fine. So you can see the game he was playing. Plain and simple fact is Ziad was late and he had questionable signatures. So he can’t be on the ballot. Had nothing to do with his ethnic background. Even if he was on the ballot he would suffer the same fate as any other candidate would against Jack. They would lose big time. So lighten up.
May 21st, 2009 at 7:54 am
Amer, I don’t care what ethnic persuasion the person is. I am pointing out that NO ONE should be allowed ignore the rules–I don’t care who it is. And, your guy shouldn’t turn around and claim he’s being singled out for different treatment when he doesn’t follow the rules and laws which are set forth in advance. Yes, there is an appeals process, for obvious reasons. But use it and leave it to the appeal instead of trying to make an end run around it by claiming he is being descriminated against, and by arguing he should be able to bring in all the peop’s whose signatures have been questioned; that’s NOT playing by the rules.
Mom, I disagree with you. Until a better system is devised, the SOS signature database is the best we have and I would say it is objective and NOT subjective. Signatures should bear a resemblance to those on file and the people who sign the petitions should actually reside at the address they have given on the Petition, don’t you think? Do you want folks in Oakland or Macomb Counties, or anywhere else in Wayne County deciding who will run for Dearborn mayor or council? I sure don’t!
CJ, your comments are right on the money, except for the last two; I really don’t care whether he would lose or not and that’s never been the criteria, nor should it be. If he complied with the law and the rules, he would have been on the ballot. I wish he had, because I happen to think that the competition in this case would have been beneficial to Dearborn; oh well, Ziad, better luck next time.
I agree with Milwood. Madam Clerk, we would sure appreciate hearing from you about the process and why Mr. Abdulmalik’s petition signatures were rejected.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:10 am
Language is a funny thing. When people use terms like “lighten up,” it makes it sound like they’re assuming they’re smarter than whomever they’re talking about. It’s actually an effective debating tool. So, good job, CJ… good job. Oh, sarcasm is also an effective debating tool.
Right, not everything is racist. I didn’t say everything was.
Joe wrote: “Again though there are people-mostly in E Dearborn who dont think they have to follow the rules, they can just claim they were picked on.”
VIRES wrote: “Cousins, lawsuits, forged signatures…same old crap for decades now….go ahead, call 911…WAIT, belay that recommendation….call ACCESS…”
Not everything is racist, but some things are. And it takes away from the fundamental discussion question: When we look at processes like these, shouldn’t we err on the side of including more signatures than less? On the side of voter inclusion, rather than less?
If someone is not a registered voter, fine… but if someone is, and his signature differs from whatever they have on file with the clerk, and he testifies that he in fact did sign it… shouldn’t we accept that?
May 21st, 2009 at 11:22 am
Also, for the record, he’s not my guy… never even met him. I’m just making my arguments based on ideas.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Mr. Ziad Abdulhamid Abdulmalik has recourse. according to the state election Laws Section 168.552 he can apeal to the County Clerk and than to the Secretary of State . if those two uphold the City Clerks ruling he can take the issue to court. It is now in Mr. Ziad Abdulhamid Abdulmalik hands as to what he would like to do.