Election law trips up aspiring judge in East Lansing

Way back in 2020, East Lansing School Board member Chris Martin, pondering a run for a 54-B District Court judgeship, plunked down $12.17 for the domain name “eastlansingjudge.com”. 

Although Martin never did anything to develop the site — easily verifiable by typing that address into a browser bar — that one small expenditure got him in a world of trouble, derailing his campaign for the seat and threatening to leave voters with just one choice: East Lansing City Councilmember Lisa Babcock. 

Babcock, a Lansing native and a 1984 Lansing Eastern High School graduate, formerly worked as a journalist but is now a lawyer in Lansing. The winner, whoever it may be, will succeed retiring Judge Richard Ball, who served the district court for 30 years. 

Martin, a Texas native, is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He worked for Texas Democratic U.S. Rep Lloyd Doggett for a couple of years in Doggett’s Washington office, taught in New York City for four years and then returned to law school at the University of Virginia. 

Martin met his wife, Laura, during his studies at UVA. The young family moved to East Lansing in 2015, after she accepted the offer of a teaching position in the School of Education at Michigan State University. 

After a stint with the Abood Law Firm in East Lansing, Martin moved to the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office. Over the last five years, he has been involved with diversionary efforts to keep low-level drug users out of the traditional criminal justice system, including drug, sobriety and mental health courts. He has been a liaison between the prosecutor’s office and diversionary courts. 

He has been part of a national working group that examines how prosecutors treat drug crimes. “I’ve been very involved in the main issues that come up in district court proceedings,” Martin said, part of what prompted him to run. 

A self-described stickler for the rules, Martin nevertheless gave little thought to what he’d spent on the website address until a friend pointed out that spending anything triggered a requirement to file a report. 

He filed that report on time, plus all the required ones that followed, all of which had zeroes in both the fundraising and spending columns. 

While filing a report in October 2021 for his school board committee, Martin said he realized his virtually dormant judgeship committee needed attention. Things began to unravel when he tried to submit a report and couldn’t. 

Someone in the Secretary of State’s Office told him it was because he had shut down his campaign committee, which he denies. “I wanted to keep it active for this very reason,” Martin said. 

He filed a report for the committee once it was reactivated five days later, and then didn’t think about it again for several more months. When he did think about it was after receiving a notice that a report had been filed, five days late. 

The notice also carried with it a $125 fine, which he attempted to protest and ultimately did not pay, a decision which would come back to haunt him. 

“I wrote back and I said I disagreed with that,” Martin said. “They wrote back and said I could disagree with it, but you owe the money.” 

The matter is in litigation, and Martin said he expects a determination around Labor Day, because ballots must be finalized by Sept. 9. The matter has already been through the Court of Claims, where Martin lost. 

He understands there are things he could have done better or differently. 

“There’s a legal process that I had to undertake to challenge their determination which I didn’t do,” Martin said. “So in the eyes of the law, which is what we’re dealing with here, there was that $125 fee, I had notice of it and I didn’t do anything about it.” 

According to lawyer, political consultant and county Commissioner Mark Grebner, changes have taken place over the last five years that have ratcheted up the pressure to pay fines associated with filing reports. 

Clerks’ offices have made that a priority, Grebner said. 

“That’s the way the world works, (but) they’ve completely lost track of what it is they’re trying to do. Instead of keeping the world safe from political corruption, they’ve turned it into a paperwork marathon.” 

Martin simply got the paperwork wrong, Grebner said, while adding there are very few who do truly understand all the nuances of the system. 

“I’ve devoted 50 years of my life to understanding it — and I don’t understand everything of how election law works,” he continued. 

“The courts have taken the unfortunate attitude that perfection is the only standard. It makes the whole thing into a trivia contest. The winner is the one who can successfully get past all the nit-picking.”