2024 States to Watch: Michigan
Michigan Supreme Court Election
In Michigan, supreme court justices are elected to eight-year terms in nonpartisan elections. Under Michigan’s unique judicial selection method, the state’s registered political parties select one candidate to run for each seat up for election on the Michigan Supreme Court. Despite being selected by the respective political parties, candidates appear on the nonpartisan judicial section of the ballot. Sitting justices receive an incumbency designation, but no candidates receive a partisan designation of any kind. Two seats are on the ballot in the November 5 general election: one full eight-year term that will expire on January 1, 2033, and one partial term that will expire on January 1, 2029. One candidate nominated by the Michigan Democratic Party and one candidate nominated by the Michigan GOP are running for each seat. No third-party candidates were nominated to seek either seat. You can view your sample ballot here.
Who’s running for the Michigan Supreme Court in 2024?
Incumbent Michigan Supreme Court Justice Kyra Harris Bolden was nominated by delegates to the Michigan Democratic Party convention in August 2024 to run for election to fill the remainder of the term she was appointed to fill following the retirement of former Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack in 2022. Bolden’s only challenger is Patrick William O’Grady, a former ____ judge, who was nominated to run for the seat by delegates to the Michigan GOP convention.
A full term on the court opened in March 2024 when incumbent Justice David Viviano announced that he would not seek election to serve a second full term on the court after his current term expires on January 1, 2025. Michigan Democrats nominated University of Michigan Law School professor Kimberly Ann Thomas, who also co-founded and currently leads the law school’s juvenile justice clinic, to run for election to the open seat on the court. Michigan Republicans nominated Andrew Fink, currently a member of the Michigan House of Representatives, to seek election to the full term.
You can learn more about each of these candidates here.
The Stakes
The Michigan Supreme Court is the court of last resort for all of the state’s civil and criminal matters and serves as a check on the state’s two other branches of government. In recent years, the court has issued crucial decisions that have impacted voting rights and election integrity, criminal justice, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protections, civil liberties, workers, public schools, tenants, and gun control.
In recent years, the court has issued several important rulings that strengthened voting rights and protected the integrity of Michigan’s elections. In late 2020, the court denied a petition for declaratory relief in a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal group that alleged that election officials engaged in fraudulent and improper conduct in administering Michigan’s 2020 presidential election and asked the court to delay the certification of the election results. The court swiftly rejected this effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election in Michigan. Then, in early 2022, the court struck down a 2018 law that had amended the procedures for circulating petitions for citizen-initiated legislative and constitutional amendments, finding it had unduly burdened the constitutional rights of voters and petition circulators. This decision paved the way for two important ballot initiative campaigns to collect the required number of signatures to appear before voters in the fall 2022 midterm elections: one that would expand voting rights including by requiring access to permanent, no-reason absentee voting, in-person voting, and 24-hour ballot drop boxes; and one that would enshrine the right to reproductive freedom into the state’s constitution. The Supreme Court was asked to resolve legal challenges filed by opponents of each measure, and ultimately ordered the state Board of Canvassers to certify both the voting rights expansion proposal and the reproductive freedom proposal. Each proposal passed that November with support from more than 56% of voters.
The court issued a series of decisions in 2022 that strengthened protections for young people who have encountered the criminal justice system. The court held that life sentences without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional when applied to juveniles and eighteen-year-olds; imposed a burden on prosecutors seeking sentences of life without parole to overcome the presumption that life without parole is disproportionate when applied to juveniles; and ordered judges to consider youth as a mitigating factor in sentencing decisions for a wide range of potential sentences.
A series of recent rulings from the court has also significantly strengthened protections for LGBTQ+ Michiganders. In 2020, the court vacated an appeals court decision that had ruled that crimes against transgender people were not covered under Michigan’s hate crime law under the category of gender, ordering the lower court to reconsider the case. This resulted in the lower court reversing its earlier decision and ruling that hate crimes against trans people are covered by the state’s hate crime law. In 2022, the court ruled that Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation or public service on the basis of sex, extends to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And last year, the court extended Michigan’s equitable parent doctrine to non-biological parents in former same-sex relationships who had been prevented from marrying their child’s legal parent or seeking custody of their children by Michigan’s unconstitutional past prohibition on same-sex marriage.
Several important cases involving environmental protections have also been decided in recent years by the court. The court strengthened the rights of citizens to challenge proposed developments on the basis that they pose a threat to the state’s natural resources when it held that the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act does not require parties challenging zoning decisions to own real property or demonstrate that zoning decisions would devalue their property. The court also ruled that the state’s department of environmental quality has the authority to regulate agricultural runoff that pollutes state waterways. The court ruled in 2020 that Flint residents of could proceed with a lawsuit that accused the state and various state officials of downplaying and concealing actions that led to the Flint Water Crisis, allowing the residents to reach a $600 million settlement with the state for implementing cost-cutting measures that ultimately poisoned the city’s water source and its people with lead.
Michigan’s highest court has also played a significant role in protecting the civil liberties of Michigan residents in recent years. The court has protected the public’s right to access and view public records, ruling that personal emails for official government business are not exempt from public records requests and that municipal cannabis licensing review boards are public bodies that are subject to the state’s open meetings requirement. The court has also strengthened protections for citizens against civil asset forfeiture processes that had been used by the state for years, ruling that the state can only apply the state’s forfeiture laws to vehicles if it can prove the vehicle was used to transport drugs for the purposes of drug trafficking. Additionally, the court required the state to pay owners of tax foreclosed homes the difference between their tax burden and the state’s profit from the sale of their home, striking down the state’s long used system of recouping property tax debt by foreclosing on and selling the homes of delinquent taxpayers.
Several important decisions affecting the rights of workers in Michigan have been issued by the court in recent years. The court ruled in 2021 that employers cannot enforce arbitration agreements against former employees who alleged sexual harassment and assault. Earlier this year, the court overturned the state legislature’s efforts to gut a 2018 ballot proposal that would have raised the state’s minimum wage, ordering the new wage system to be implemented and resulting in huge raises for low-wage Michigan workers that will take effect next year.
The court protected the state’s public education system when it ruled that the state was improperly counting payments to charter schools as part of spending for local governments in violation of the state constitution. The rights of renters and tenants were strengthened when the court made some rules that had been implemented during the pandemic-era eviction moratorium permanent. And last year, the court delivered a historic ruling when it ordered the parents of a school shooter who killed four of his classmates with a gun purchased by the parents only days before to stand trial on four counts of involuntary manslaughter associated with the killings. Both parents were later convicted, paving the way for prosecutors in other jurisdictions to charge parents whose unstable children use weapons they furnished to injure or kill others.
Michigan’s highest court has issued decisions in recent years that have significantly impacted the health, safety, and prosperity of Michigan residents. The justices who sit on this court play an important role in ensuring that every Michigander has access to justice in the state’s legal system.
How You Can Get Involved
Michigan’s general election will be held on November 5, 2024.
- Check your registration status here.
- Not registered? You can register to vote online here.
- If you’re unable to go to the polls or want to vote by mail, you can find more information on absentee voting here.
- You can also vote early in-person with an absentee ballot at your local election clerk’s office within the 40 days before an upcoming election. Check your polling place or find your clerk’s office here.
Make your plan to vote. In Michigan, you can vote by mail ballot, vote in person early at your local election clerk’s office, or in-person at your polling place.
- Early voting begins Sunday, October 6, 2024.
- The last day to register, in any other way than in-person at your local clerk’s office, is Monday, October 21, 2024.
- The deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail is Friday, November 1, 2024.
- Michigan has same-day voter registration, so you can register to vote at your city or township clerk’s office until 8:00 pm on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, 2024. If you want to vote in-person on Election Day, make sure you know your polling place.
