Wayne County Circuit Judge Lita Popke has dismissed a suit Detroit mayoral candidate Tom Barrow and allies filed to remove Mike Duggan as a write-in candidate and to have his use of copies of the city’s election ballot to educate voters how to write him in declared illegal.
Popke is the same judge who initially ruled Duggan ineligible to be on the ballot as a named candidate because he hadn’t lived in the city for a year on the day he filed his campaign signatures.
On Monday, according to Matt Helms of the Free Press, said Duggan meets all requirements to run as a write-in candidate and that his campaign did not violate election law by using facsimiles of ballots to instruct voters how to write in his name and fill in the oval next to it so that the votes officially count.
"The lawsuit by Barrow, a four-time mayoral candidate, and labor activist Robert Davis challenged the use of copies of ballots, saying it violated state election law. But Popke said the law applies to actual official ballots and not clear copies of them that can in no way be used at polling places. Barrow and Davis’s suit specifically cited copies of ballots used on Duggan’s campaign Web site, a large cardboard copy used at campaign events and on literature being distributed to voters."
