Hollier campaign claims 'bad faith' in Thanedar's bid to block him from ballot

U.S. House candidate Adam Hollier of Detroit says hundreds of challenges to his individual petition signatures made by U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar are "baseless," saying the congressman acted in "bad faith" and with the "clear" attempt to disenfranchise Black voters across Michigan's 13th Congressional District.

Lawyers for Hollier, who is seeking to unseat Thanedar in the Democratic primary election, deemed the congressman's petition challenge "legally flawed," in part because he directed it to the wrong entity and made his complaint under the wrong part of state election law.

They argue in a brief submitted Tuesday to Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett that the majority of challenges alleging the signer isn't registered to vote are incorrect, and that the complaint overall fails to set forth which specific signatures are claimed to be invalid.

"At its core, Mr. Thanedar's challenge is a thinly disguised attempt at voter suppression to prevent the voters from casting their ballot for the candidates of their choosing," attorneys W. Alan Wilk and Melvin "Butch" Hollowell wrote as part of Hollier's legal response to the challenge.

Hollier's response does stipulate that certain signatures contained on nine pages of "supplemental" petitions were "likely" forged by a paid circulator, Londell Thomas of Harper Woods. Hollier has said he's disappointed this happened, and the campaign said it's in the process of reporting the suspected signature fraud to the Wayne County prosecutor.

But the campaign is urging officials not to toss all signatures or petitions certified by Thomas.

"Our forthright agreement that Londell Thomas likely forged supplemental petitions S-2 through S-10 does not mean that other aspects of Candidate Thanedar's complaint are valid," Hollier's lawyers wrote.

"Whatever conduct Mr. Thomas may have engaged in outside the bounds of his authority, it is also that he appears to have gathered valid petition signatures. These signers are actual Americans expressing their constitutional rights which should not be taken from them as Mr. Thanedar requests."

Indeed, Hollier's campaign says it reached out to a number voters whose names appeared on the non-supplemental petitions circulated by Thomas to confirm whether they signed, and many said they did so, including 29 who swore in affidavits to that effect, including one from the actor Hill Harper of Detroit, a candidate for U.S. Senate.

The Hollier campaign's lawyers also added that it can't represent "with certainty" how many signatures might have been invalid on the petitions that Thomas submitted, but they assert that sufficient valid signatures from voters in the district remain.

In a statement Wednesday, Thanedar said his challenge was spurred by Hollier's signatures containing hundreds of individuals who don't live in the 13th District or aren't registered to vote, as well dozens of duplicate and fraudulent signatures.

"If this is the kind of operation Adam is running for his campaign, there's no way he could effectively represent the congressional district," Thanedar said.

"The Hollier campaign in their response failed to show 1,000 valid signatures, which is the requirement to get on the ballot."

Thanedar's challenge, filed last week, focused in part on the supplemental petition sheets submitted by Thomas that appear to be signed over and over by the same person, with distinct similarities in handwriting and the same long flourish at the end of each line.

Thomas, co-owner of Groundmind Strategies in Southfield, was one of the two main circulators who collected the roughly 1,555 signatures submitted by the campaign of Hollier, a former state senator who served in Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's cabinet. Thomas did not return calls or emails last week to comment on the allegations.

Thomas appears to have collected signatures for other campaigns, including Harper's. Thomas also submitted petition challenges on behalf Harper's campaign challenging certain signatures submitted by Harper's opponents in the Democratic primary — U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Holly and Nasser Beydoun of Dearborn.

The alleged forgery of petitions is reminiscent of the signature fraud scandal that blocked five Republican gubernatorial candidates from Michigan's primary ballot in 2022. In that episode, state election officials invalidated thousands of signatures submitted by the campaigns, finding many had been forged by petition circulators. Criminal charges were later filed against several of the signature collectors.

Thanedar has said Hollier's error was in part that he didn't submit enough signatures to serve as a buffer in case some of those collected were invalidated. Candidates for U.S. House may submit up to 2,000 signatures to meet the 1,000-signature threshold required by the state to get on the ballot.

"Ultimately, the buck stops at the candidate," Thanedar said last week. "It's the candidate who's filing it, and it didn't take that long to see that there are discrepancies."

In addition to the alleged forgeries, Thanedar's challenge sought to strike hundreds of Hollier's other signatures on the basis that the signers either live outside the district (228), aren’t registered to vote (338), are registered at a different address (142), are duplicate signers (90) or for other reasons.

Wayne County Clerk Garrett's office will next conduct an investigation and produce a staff report on whether Hollier's petitions meet the requirements set out under state law. Garrett's final decision may be appealed to the Secretary of State's office or taken to the circuit court.

Hollier's campaign said it used the company Vera Lab LLC to run a report comparing the signatures collected by the Hollier campaign and signatures by the same voter in prior ballot initiatives or elections.

The analysis found 221 signatures appeared to match the prior signature on file, including those challenged because they were on petitions circulated by Thomas. "This is strong evidence that many valid signatures exist" among those collected by Thomas, Hollier's lawyers asserted.

Hollier's campaign also claimed that Thanedar's challenge "overstates" the number of incorrect addresses in the petitions and unregistered voters who signed, arguing that he "went out of his way" to deliberately misread names on the petition or only searched the voter's initials in an effort to "boost" the raw number of challenged signatures.

In closing, Hollier's lawyers asked Garrett that if she determines that Hollier doesn't have 1,000 valid signatures on file, the campaign requests that she apply "comparable scrutiny" for forgery to other nominating petitions for the candidates for U.S. House, noting that other complaints of forgery by paid circulators are being reported.

mburke@detroitnews.com