But not in the 2020 election.
Thirty-six signature gatherers were found to have forged thousands of signatures on the nominating petitions. Because of that, five candidates do not qualify for the ballot. One of the five is already blaming Democrats:
I wonder what those sheets of forged signatures look like and what names they used. I get a hand cramp signing my own name a few times. I couldn’t imagine signing thousands of different names and trying to make them look different. And it was thousands of fraudulent signatures.
Here you go. (pdf warning)
It’s pretty interesting. Pages 2 and 3 have information about what they found and there are samples of the actual petitions further down the document.
I hope at least a few were “Ollie Tabooger”, “Jaques Strap”, and “I’m A Stupid Moron With An Ugly Face And A Big Butt And My Butt Smells And I Like To Kiss My Own Butt”.
Stranger
That is interesting. The “round-table” method is a little more convincing than the sheets that had one individual fill out the whole thing and it was very noticeable.
I already had the image of Bart Simpson filling out the chalkboard and using the fake names he’d ask for when he called Moe’s.
Several pages of signatures for different candidates were identical. It was clearly some sort of fraud. Let’s hope there are laws that can be used to actually prosecute someone. Certainly nothing will happen to the candidates or their campaign staff for filing these fraudulent petitions, it’s not clear to me if they have any involvement in them or they were sent directly to the Secretary of State by the petition circulators who signed the forms.
Trumpy McTrumpface?
It looks like the head of the firm contracted to get these signatures pled guilty to voter fraud in 2011. From that document:
At this point, the Bureau does not have reason to believe that any specific candidates or
campaigns were aware of the activities of fraudulent-petition circulators. The Bureau notes the
preponderance of media reports about the difficulty in securing circulators and signatures this
year, given the abundance of petition campaigns nationwide and the continuing lack of in-person
events.13 Reportedly, the average cost of signature gathering rose from $5 to $7 per signature to
$20 per signature. A news article from late 2021 indicates that head of the firm was recruiting
circulators in Florida.14 He previously pled guilty to two counts of election fraud in 2011, in which he reportedly instructed two individuals to sign as a witness on dozens of petition sheets
filled with signatures they did not collect.
20 bucks a signature sounds ludicrous until you consider it relative to the total cost of a gubernatorial campaign.
Still, $20 x 2,000 signatures x 10 campaigns is $400,000 on the table. Even if the circulators only get a quarter of that for their work, there’s still huge motivation to cheat.
And yet he is still in business and petitions are accepted from his canvassers. Once again, the closer you get to the government the less effective the laws are. These people are not government officials but they work for such officials or people seeking such positions. They have rigged the system to protect themselves.
I was picturing Jerry, from Fargo, writing illegible VINs on the car loan docs, but changing pens or purposely wearing down/sharpening the pencil between each one so it didn’t look like he just sat down and wrote one after another.
This seems the environment where one might spot the famous but elusive Weedlord Bonerhitler.
I had to Google that, but now I’m laughing even harder! 
One of these candidates, Michael Brown lived across the street from me when he was a new State trooper. His wife, Lori was a hairdresser that cut my wife’s and my hair.
Okay, I’m British, and I don’t really understand how American elections work. We don’t elect judges over here. I’m not sure why this should be illegal.
From what I see, a particular group of people have put their names on two forms nominating two candidates. I’m thinking of a meeting of the local Republican club, where the two forms were passed from member to member, each in turn signing their name to both forms. Naturally, the two will show the same names in the same order. Is this illegal? Is there any requirement that a person only nominates a single candidate?
Y’all remember how Republicans were worried about the collapse of democracy some 15 years ago when ACORN had a few subcontractors cheat on voter registration, right? Like, no actual fraudulent votes were cast, but a few lazy corrupt subcontractors pretended to register nonexistent people so they could pocket some extra cash?
Well, move over, ACORN, because Republicans have a new target. You know they’ll spare no expense or media blitz to prevent this sort of fraud from happening again!
No. But there were thousands of bogus nominating signatures for each of these candidates. You’re not going to find that many people at the local Republican Club.
Furthermore, if there appears to be anything wrong, they can always double check by comparing the signatures on the sheet with those on file with the Elections Office. All registered voters have signed a voter registration card and they keep those on file. In fact, in my state, all registration cards have been optically scanned so they can be called up by computer. I expect other states probably do the same. So I’m sure they’ve double checked all these bogus signatures before disqualifying any candidates.
Those identical forms were just part of the problems discovered after an initial tip about fraudulent canvassers. Those forms are just highly noticeable because it would be so rare to see them filled out in such a manner. Numerous other anomalies were discovered that are also indicative of fraud such as the signers misspelling their own address or listing addresses they no longer resided at.
It appears in the state of Michigan you can sign petitions for more than one candidate. Other states have different rules.
This is often a problem getting on the ballot for other offices as well, not just judges. The candidates and parties fight the validity of petitions to stop competitors from getting on the ballot. I don’t know if there are party affiliated nominations for judges in Michigan, in states where there are the major political parties nominate their own candidates and may fight the validity of independent and small party petitions to keep them off the ballot. It can be a messy process in some states. The legislators in office don’t write the laws to make it easy for someone else to take their place.
Olaf Mifrenzargai
Note that these were candidates for Governor, not judges. Also note there were invalid signatures in nominating petitions for 10 different candidates, not just 5. It’s just that in those 5 who were not declared ineligible, there weret enough valid ones to meet the minimum (15,000).
You have it backwards. In many places (I assume most, but I don’t have a cite to confirm), the prospective candidate does not qualify for the ballot without showing a minimum base of existing support, which typically takes the form of some large number of signatures. (This is also frequently true for citizen-initiative measures.) The idea is to prevent cluttering the ballot with a large number of on-a-whim individuals or pranksters or just plain loons; you don’t get to put yourself in front of the voters unless you can demonstrate that you are at least reasonably well known and plausible as a candidate.