What is a Con Con?

Every 16 years, Michigan voters are asked a question most of them have never had to think about before: Should the state hold a constitutional convention (Con Con)? This November, that question returns to the ballot as Proposal 1. Michigan voters have said no three times before in 1978, 1994, and 2010. This year, they should say no again.

Unlike most ballot measures, which appear because a group collected signatures or the legislature referred them, the Con Con question is different: it’s automatic. Michigan’s constitution requires that voters be asked, every sixteen years, whether they want to convene a convention to rewrite the state’s governing document. This requirement dates back to the 1963 constitution itself, and it appears first on the General election ballot whenever the cycle comes around, whether or not anyone is actively campaigning for it.

That’s exactly what’s happening in 2026. Voters rejected the question in 1978, in 1994, and most recently in 2010 — each time by wide margins. The fact that it’s back isn’t a sign of public demand for a rewrite; it’s simply the clock running out on a 16-year cycle written into the Michigan constitution itself.

A “Con Con” is a gathering of elected delegates tasked with drafting a new state constitution, or substantially revising the existing one. If Michigan voters were to approve Proposal 1, delegates would be elected, they would meet to draft a new or revised constitution, and whatever they produced would then go back to voters for final approval or rejection.

That last step sounds like a safeguard, and on paper it is one. But by the time a final document reaches voters, the terms of the debate have already been set by whoever most successfully shaped delegate elections, funded campaigns, and dominated the drafting process. A “yes” vote this November doesn’t just start a neutral, technical process. It opens the entire Michigan Constitution to renegotiation, at a moment when well-funded special interests are already positioned to shape the outcome.

Michigan’s current constitution was adopted in 1963, following a convention voters approved in 1961. It’s the fourth constitution in the state’s history, replacing earlier documents from 1835, 1850, and 1908, and it remains the framework under which every subsequent amendment has been added. Michigan hasn’t gone through a full constitutional rewrite in over sixty years, and for good reason. The amendment process built into that 1963 document has worked. Voters have used it directly, again and again, to make deliberate, specific changes to their constitution without having to reopen the entire thing.

This is the heart of the case against Proposal 1: Michigan doesn’t need a convention to change its constitution. It already has a trusted, voter-driven path to do exactly that — the citizen-led ballot initiative process. Michiganders have used this process directly and successfully in recent years, including to protect reproductive freedom and to reform how the state draws its legislative districts. In each case, voters wrote the change, collected signatures, and voted it into the constitution themselves, with no delegates and no convention required.

A Con Con doesn’t add a new tool to that process; it actually undermines it. Instead of voters proposing and approving specific, targeted changes, a convention hands broad drafting authority to a separate body of elected delegates. Every right and protection Michiganders have voted into their constitution over the past decade would be back on the table, subject to renegotiation by that body rather than by the voters who put those protections there in the first place.

Proponents of a convention argue that Michigan’s governing document is overdue for a comprehensive rewrite and that some voter-approved amendments, in particular, deserve reconsideration. But that argument reveals exactly what’s at stake: a convention isn’t a neutral tidying-up exercise. It’s an opportunity for the very provisions Michigan voters fought to enact directly to be unwound by delegates who may not share their priorities.

This danger has a name in Michigan political circles: the “runaway convention.” Nonpartisan analyses prepared ahead of the 2010 vote warned that a convention held during a period of intense political polarization could become a magnet for national interest groups and deep-pocketed political operations, all seeking to influence delegate elections and, in turn, the substance of a new constitution. Michigan’s political environment is, if anything, more polarized today than it was in 2010. There’s no reason to believe a 2026 convention would be less vulnerable to that kind of capture, and strong reason to believe it would be more so.

It’s true that any document a convention produces still has to go back to voters before it takes effect. But treating that as sufficient protection misunderstands how these processes actually play out. By the time voters get their up-or-down vote on a finished document, months or years of delegate elections, drafting sessions, and political campaigning have already shaped what’s on the page. Whoever wins that fight, not the ordinary voter reading a ballot summary in November, determines what Michiganders are ultimately asked to accept or reject.

Compare that to Michigan’s existing ballot initiative process. Every step, from drafting the language to collecting signatures to the final vote, stays directly in the hands of citizens. There’s no intermediary body, no delegate election, no months-long drafting process that outside money can quietly dominate. If Michiganders want to change their constitution, they already have the tools to do it themselves, one targeted amendment at a time, without risking the rest of the document in the process.

Michigan voters have rejected this question three times before, and for good reason. A constitutional convention doesn’t offer Michiganders anything they don’t already have. It only adds risk: the risk that hard-won voter protections get reopened, the risk that well-funded interests dominate a process most voters will never closely follow, and the risk that the document Michigan has operated under since 1963 gets rewritten by people other than the voters themselves.

This November 2026, protect the constitutional protections Michigan voters have already built, and protect the process that let them build it. Vote no on Proposal 1.