Michigan Ballot Initiative Could Be Decided By...the Width of a Dime?

Andrew conducts the communications efforts for CMS (websites, press relations, and project and event publicity) as well as those for MIT's Center for Civic Media and the MIT Game Lab.
A native of Washington, D.C., he holds a degree in communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. His marketing and P.R. skills were honed at Houghton Mifflin and Tufts University. He was also the long-time fiction editor for Identity Theory and followed up with a literary tool website, called Readsfeed.
Michigan Ballot Initiative Could Be Decided By...the Width of a Dime?
As a type geek, I find this Michigan court battle inspiring. As a citizen, it's uglier than Comic Sans:
At issue is whether a summary of the question, used on a petition to gather signatures to get the question on the ballot, was written in a type size specified by state law: 14-point boldface. The typeface used on the petition was 14-point Calibri produced by Microsoft Corp.'s Word software, but a dispute has arisen over whether the font renders the type at the full 14-point size.
The difference in size, as pointed out to the Michigan Supreme court, is the width of a dime.
At stake, depending on which side's lawyers were talking Wednesday in Michigan Supreme Court, is either a narrow matter of whether statutes about ballot questions should be enforced as written, or a broader philosophical question of whether typographical quirks can be used to block citizens from deciding major issues at the polls.
[...]
The letters in the Calibri font used by Stand Up For Democracy, when measured using an "E scale" ruler used by type designers, were less than 14/72 of an inch tall, which is the definition of 14-point type, Michigan's Court of Appeals had ruled. But the lower court said the question should remain on the ballot because the petition was in "substantial compliance" with the law, and Michigan courts previously ruled that was good enough.
Stimulus vs. austerity. Union vs. corporation. And now, finally, MSWord vs. E scales.
