Because many of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to secure his place on the ballot were judged to be invalid. Conyers submitted the maximum allowed 2,000 signatures — double the requisite 1,000 — but most didn’t count, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett decided last week.
At issue is the people who collected the signatures for Conyers. State law requires that they be registered to vote in the state. Conyers’s primary opponent, Rev. Horace Sheffield, challenged the signatures collected by two people who did not appear to be registered to vote at the time they gathered them. The Detroit News later reported on two more people who did not appear to be registered voters. Subtracting invalid signatures, including those collected by people who weren’t allowed to do so, Garrett’s office judged that Conyers only submitted 592 valid signatures. So, yeah. You do the math.