Now a month behind schedule, the campaign to ban race-conscious policies in public education expects to soon conclude its petition drive.

And while the end seems near, it still has at least one more legal obstacle on the horizon — the state Supreme Court.

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is asking its petitioners to send in their signatures by the end of the month. MCRI has been collecting signatures to get on the ballot in 2006. The deadline to collect the 317,757 signatures is in early January, although MCRI can technically continue to collect signatures if it misses that deadline.

MCRI would not release how many signatures have been collected to date, but Tim O’Brien, who coordinates the unpaid signature-gathering effort, said “most” of the signatures are in.

The group is telling all of its petitioners to send in their signatures by Nov. 30 or Dec. 1 so that MCRI will have enough time to count the signatures. The campaign, however, had originally told its petitioners to send their signatures in by mid-October.

“The fact that we’re continuing to do our job and continuing to work hard should not be an indication as to exactly where we stand,” MCRI Director of Outreach Chetly Zarko said. He added that the November date is “not a hard and fast rule,” and it was chosen because it was a convenient date that people can remember. Throughout its campaign, the group has encouraged its circulators to send in signatures as they collect them.

The group’s January deadline, Zarko said, is also flexible. MCRI can choose any 180-day time period to collect signatures as long as they are finished by July 6, 2006. The campaign chose January because they wanted to build upon the momentum from earlier in the year.

In the coming weeks, the state Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a case questioning MCRI’s petition form, which opponents claim is misleading. The form does not mention that the state constitution already guarantees equal protection under law. Opponents argue this omission was deliberate, saying MCRI wants to “deceive the public” by arguing that affirmative action is reverse discrimination.

The case was filed by the activist group BAMN, which has a chapter at the University, and has made its way through the courts since the first ruling in March. The lawsuits severely crippled the campaign earlier in the year, casting a veil of uncertainty as the campaign failed to collect enough signatures to get on the 2004 ballot, MCRI officials said. Eventually, they had to delay their plans until the 2006 election.

“What threw us for a loop were all these legal challenges,” O’Brien said.

Both O’Brien and Zarko said they are not concerned about the largely conservative state Supreme Court. Because the appeals court ruled in MCRI’s favor and validated its petition, they said it was unlikely the state Supreme Court will reverse that decision.

“We’re confident that the language of our petition is legal,” Zarko said.

BAMN filed the appeal to the Supreme Court in late July, and the court could decide to hear the case anytime from the end of this month to January, officials at the court’s clerk office said.

BAMN attorney George Washington said he could not predict what the court will do and that the process often takes longer. So MCRI may not know about the status of its petitions until they have sent them in.

This court case could be the opposition’s best chance to stop the initiative before it gets on the ballot.

“In our view, it’s going to be absolutely essential to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative from deceiving the people of Michigan,” BAMN national spokeswoman Shanta Driver said. “But it’s a very conservative Supreme Court at this point.”

Even if MCRI overcomes that legal hurdle, BAMN plans to challenge the validity of the group’s signatures in court, a practice common with contentious ballot initiatives.

“This is round one of the court fight, but it is by no means the last round,” Driver said. “We’ll do whatever is necessary” to stop the initiative.

Although MCRI officials continually assert that the campaign is moving along at a healthy pace, Driver said it is still faltering.

“I think they’ve got some problems. I think it’s stalling too in a number of places,” she said, citing growing opposition at the University’s Flint and Dearborn campuses, Central Michigan University and Wayne State University. “There’s a real positive response to this” opposition effort, she said.