MI AG Election Law Guidance to Law Enforcement Focused Upon Poll Challenger Restrictions to Exclusion of Poll Challenger Rights (MI)

Measured strictly against the Attorney General’s own guidance to law enforcement, challenger rights were emphasized to the exclusion of — indeed, to the near-total absence of — affirmative rights in 2020, because the AG addressed challengers only through the lens of intimidation, disturbance, and prosecution, never as participants holding rights. When the AG did finally speak to law enforcement about challengers in the 2024 letter, the treatment was real but lopsided: roughly seven brief rights statements against a far longer apparatus of prohibitions, expulsion triggers, and six separate arrest/enforcement hooks — while omitting the one statute (MCL 168.733(4)) that imposes a duty to protect challengers. Across both cycles, the AG’s law-enforcement guidance framed challengers primarily as potential disruptors to be warned, ejected, and prosecuted. The inferred intent of such guidance is to discourage independent oversight of election operations.