Local 4 has learned that among the circulators the Conyers campaign hired are a man and a woman named Daniel Alex Pennington and Tiara Willis Pittman. They were, as best we can determine, collecting signatures for the Conyers campaign starting back in December 2013. They also turned in their petitions by the April 22nd deadline and, we were told, they collected more than 300 signatures.

Cathy Garrett’s office reported, as of the end of the nominating petition deadline, that John Conyers would be on the August 5th primary ballot having made that deadline with enough signatures. But then a canvass is completed to make certain there were enough valid signatures on the petitions. This can take a week or more.

During the Conyers canvass last night, Garrett’s office went to check to see if Conyers’ signatures were valid and it turned out that Pennington and Pittman’s names did not show up in the State of Michigan Voter Registration Database. Then this morning after another check, their names suddenly showed up. Not only that, they showed voter registrations in the City of Detroit and that they filed their voter registration request on December 13th, 2013.

This raised a red flag. How can someone who registered to vote last December not show up in the database Monday night but show up on Tuesday morning?