Is the state Legislature spending too much of your hard-earned money? Should future Legislatures be able to increase spending to better fund state programs?

If the State Board of Canvassers votes as expected tomorrow, it won't matter what you think.

The Stop Overspending Proposal, which canvassers will likely reject tomorrow morning, would constitutionally ban any increases in state spending or taxes above the level of inflation or population growth - effectively freezing state spending at current levels.

The proposal could have dire implications for the University, which has seen a steep decline in state appropriations lately.

But chances are it won't make it to the ballot.

On Wednesday, an advisory board connected with the secretary of state's office recommended the petition be thrown out after a state investigation revealed that hundreds of thousands of signatures on the petition were invalid. Lacking those signatures, the petitioners were about 12,000 signatures short of the 317,757 needed to for the proposal to be placed on the ballot.

This shortfall is a serious setback to the campaign, which has enjoyed strong support in recent polls.

The Detroit Free Press and WDIV found overwhelming support among voters for the proposal in a poll released last week, with 65 percent of respondents saying they would vote for it.

The proposal is similar to the 1992 Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights,. That proposal barred any increases in state taxes or spending without direct voter approval. The proposal passed, but it was partially repealed by Colorado voters in 2005.

Unlike other ballot proposals like the Michigan Civil Rights Iniatitve and the now unnecessary Raise the Wage campaign, the Stop Overspending Proposal had almost no organized student support.

"I would have voted for it, but I don't know anyone on campus who was actively supporting it," Brian Steers, secretary of the College Republicans, said.

Alum Ryan Bates joined the Michigan Voter Education Project in Ann Arbor last summer to campaign against the overspending proposal after he graduated last summer. He, too, had never heard of a student who gathered signatures for the petition.

Typically a petition drive that turned in 500,000 signatures would have no problem getting on the ballot. Even if 10 percent of the signatures are disqualified, which is average for a statewide petition, there are still more than 317,757 signatures: the amount needed to make the ballot. But the overspending proposal ran into trouble because its petitions contained an unusually high number of duplicate signatures. This is especially damaging to a petition drive, because if state investigators find two identical signatures, both are thrown out.

Mark Grebner, a Democratic consultant with experience in petition drives, conducted an audit of the petition signatures for Defend Michigan, a group that campaigned against the overspending proposal. His audit found over 100,000 duplicate signatures as well as tens of thousands that were invalid for other reasons.

"This was unlike anything I have ever seen before," Grebner said. "Typically you see a 12-percent rate of duplicate signatures, but these guys had over 20 percent."

The secretary of state confirmed most of Grebner's findings through its own investigation.

Scott Tillman, a spokesman for Stop Overspending, said the campaign's opponents would stop at nothing to prevent the proposal from appearing on the ballot.

"Just because someone accidentally signed a petition twice does not mean they were trying to commit election fraud," Tillman said.

Grebner said the petition drive probably failed because the organizers hired unreliable paid petition circulators, rather than college students or volunteers. He also stressed that his investigation found no evidence of voter fraud.

"It is not a criminal racket, but they had to find guys who don't have real jobs," Grebner said. "If you pay people who normally spend their days washing windows at stop signs hundreds of dollars to collect signatures, you will get hundreds of signatures, but you may not be happy with the quality you get."

Tillman said the proposal's backers hired National Voter Outreach, based in Ludington, to use paid petition circulators. He said he was not sure whether or not Stop Overspending would take legal action against National Voter Outreach because of the high number of duplicate signatures.