It's on in Michigan

Perfectly legible

The Michigan State Supreme Court has ruled that the bullsh%$ objections of the Republican members to an initiative to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution is just that, bullsh%$.

The court is requiring the Michigan Board of State Canvassers to certify the plebiscite.

The Republican members of the board forced a 2-2 tie, initially preventing the measure from reaching the ballot because they thought that the spacing between the words was too close. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

So the measure will be on the general election ballot, and if Kansas is any indication, there are a lot of people who will show up to vote who otherwise would not as a result.

The Republicans are coming to terms with the fact that one of their unifying party planks, the desire to keep women in chains, is not that popular once they get out of their bubble:

Tiny spaces and cries of gibberish are not enough to derail an effort to explicitly enshrine abortion rights in the Michigan Constitution, according to a ruling issued Thursday by the state's highest court.

The ruling, the court's first dealing at all with abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the national right to an abortion afforded under Roe v. Wade, means Michiganders will have the chance to amend the state Constitution when they cast their ballots this fall.

By a 5-2 decision, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the Board of State Canvassers must certify a proposed constitutional amendment despite the alleged typographical issues. Chief Justice Bridget McCormack chastised board members and abortion rights opponents who suggested the space between words in a measure that garnered more than 750,000 signatures should be a fatal flaw.

"The challengers have not produced a single signer who claims to have been confused by the limited-spacing sections in the full text portion of the proposal. Yet two members of the Board of State Canvassers would prevent the people of Michigan from voting on the proposal because they believe that the decreased spacing makes the text no longer '[t]he full text.' That is, even though there is no dispute that every word appears and appears legibly and in the correct order, and there is no evidence that anyone was confused about the text, two members of the Board of State Canvassers with the power to do so would keep the petition from the voters for what they purport to be a technical violation of thestatute," she wrote.

"They would disenfranchise millions of Michiganders not because they believe the many thousands of Michiganders who signed the proposal were confused by it, but because they think they have identified a technicality that allows them to do so, a game of gotcha gone very bad. What a sad marker of the times."

If this boosts voter turnout significantly, it could result in significant losses for the Michigan state Republican party, and this is a good thing.