The Michigan State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse

Corrections to Widely Reported Convention Myths
Published in Michigan News Media

Limits on What a Convention Can Propose

Consitutional convention opponents seek to make changing Michgan's constitution sound as risky as possible. One way they do that is by making it sound like the only option for a conventnion is to change the entire constitution in one revision. But a convention is under no obligation to do so. As many conventions in other states have done, it can propose only amendments to the existing constitution.  For example, New Hampshire has the second oldest constitution in the world yet has held 16 conventions, each one of which only proposed amendments to the existing constitution. After its statehood convention, Michigan has half the time taken a middle course: proposing a general revision plus amendments incorporating more controversial proposals.

Unfortunately, Michigan's press has adopted the spin of convention opponents on this and other convention issues. For example, Michigan Public Radio has described the last stage of the convention process as follows: "Once the majority of delegates agree on a draft, it then goes back to voters for final approval. If voters say no to the new constitution, the current constitution remains in effect." Although that's what a conventinon could do, it's a fundamentally misleading statement about what a convention must do.

Unfortunately, Michigan's leading public policy institute that has written on this subject has perpetrated this and other myths in its misleading history of Michigan's conventions, which fails to describe how Michigan conventions have made multiple proposals, including individual amendments, not just general revisions. Unfortunately, this misleading history has been echoed in the press 

Michigan's Convention History

Michigan conventions have a history of making a primary proposal and secondary proposals, where the primary proposal includes many proposals bundled into a single revision, and the secondary proposals are individual amendments that involve controversial proposals, such as extending suffrage to blacks in 1850, which the convention feared would kill its other proposals if bundled into one proposal. Thus, the convention offered it to the public as a separate proposal.

1850 Constitutional Convention

On November 5, 1850, voters approved the primary constitutional proposal (36,169 to 9,433) while rejecting the secondary proposal (12,840 to 32,026). Had suffrage been embedded directly within the text, it likely would have threatened ratification of the entire constitution.

1867 Constitutional Convention

This time the primary proposal incorporated Black male suffrage directly into the main text rather than separating it as an amendment.

The secondary proposals were amendments to: 1) prohibit regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors, and 2) change legislative sessions from meeting annually vs. biennieally.

Both the primary and secondary proposals were defeated.

In 1907-1908 and 1961-1962, the conventions only produced primary proposals, which both passed. Given the experiences of 1850 and 1867, controversial, high-risk proposals were avoided.

Correction

I wrote to the Michigan Public Radio reporter and, to his credit, he partially corrected his article on August 26, 2026, two days after it was originally published. The correction reads:

After this story intitially published, we got an email from J.H. Snider pointing out that the delegates are not required to draft an entirely new constitution. They would also be allowed to submit amendments to the constitution, or submit a new constitution plus additional amendments, and voters would decide each separately.

I applaud Michigan Public Radio for making this correction. But I would add that there are at least a half dozen other news media outlets that have made the same error without making a correction.

The Democratic Function of a Convention

Convention opponents claim that the democratic function of a convention is to update a constitution, a function that can be equally well served by other constitutional change mechanisms. In fact, the convention process was created in Massachusetts in the late 1770s because in the then new era of written constitutions, it was recognized that a state legislature had an inherent conflict of interest in designing its own powers. Hence, an external body would have to be created to propose changes to a written constitution and those proposed changes would have to be directly ratified by the people if they were to become law.

Unfortunately, Michigan's press has adopted the spin of convention opponents on this issue. In a breathtakingly biased analogy, Michigan Public Radio compares the 16-year convention referendum to "cicada broods," which are widely considered a pest. That would be like saying that periodic legislative sessions are also like cicada broods. Periodic sessions were created to prevent the king or governor from not calling them, which was a major problem in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War.

The periodic convention was created because the framers understood that legislatures were the natural enemies of the convention process, which would take away a legislature's monopoly power over constitutional agenda-setting. Consequently, a legislature wouldn't call one, especially when it feared a convention might make it more democratically accountable. Placing it automatically on the ballot at periodic intervals was a workaround that conflict-of-interest problem.

But cicado broods are mere metaphor.  The same Michigan Public Radio article explains the reason for the convention  process, which closely follows the opposition's talking points: "The idea is to have a regular mechanism in place for citizens to decide whether the state’s constitution truly matches its time." Voilla, there is no need for a convention process to fill this function, as Michigan's legislature can fill this function just as well. 

Alas, the Citizens Council of Michigan has not helped matters by making the following highly misleading claims, as reported by Michigan Advance:

Eric Lupher,  president of the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council (CRC) of Michigan, told the Michigan Advance that the idea to make the option for a convention a regular feature came from the Con-Con that produced the 1963 constitution. 

“They said, ‘Well, let’s just be proactive about saying we’re going to ask you on a regular basis.’ If you feel like things are working well and if you say no, we just go on with life as normal. But if not, then we dig into a process,” said Lupher.

The first claim is misleading because the original periodic constitutional convention referendum was created by Michigan's 1850, not 1963, convention. But that may merely be a reporting or lapsed memory error, and it's also true that the convention leading to the 1963 Constitution did reinsert the periodic convention referendum clause into its proposed constitutional revision. 

The second claim concerning why that provision is in the constitution is much more troubling, especially because it  has been repeated by other media outlets. The 1850 convention placed the periodic convention referendum provision into Michigan's Constitution because it didn't trust the legislature to call a convention when it was needed and the people therefore wanted one. 

As also reported in another Michigan Advance article:

 [T]he Citizens Research Council is working hard to explain to Michigan’s voters the nuances of a complex question — whether or not the state should take on a Constitutional Convention in 2027. 

It’s just the latest in a long series of issues the council has taken on since its founding, seeking to provide analysis and research of Michigan’s public policy issues without a partisan or ideological slant, which the group has been doing since 1916.

But the above analysis suggests that they haven't gotten the "nuances" right, if by right means the nuances of the historical record. But if it means how to appear not to be taking a side in a news media environment overwhelmingly dominated by "no" coalition messaging, it has indeed gotten the "nuances" right.