A Reader Said a Judicial Candidate Campaigned Illegally at the Courthouse. Here Is What Michigan Law Actually Says.

What the Tip Claimed

The submission reached Clutch Justice through the site’s tip line. The reader’s message is summarized below, with identifying details removed.

That last sentence is the heart of the claim, and it reflects a belief many people share: that campaign material of any kind is banned anywhere the government owns the ground. Michigan law is more specific than that, and the specifics matter here.

The Facts Clutch Justice Could Confirm

A source with direct knowledge of the vehicle told Clutch Justice the truck is Fields’s own mid-size GMC pickup, the vehicle she drives as a matter of routine. When she has court business, that is the truck she drives to court, and it goes where every other attorney’s car goes: the parking lot. The source rejected the premise that parking it there amounts to campaigning.

Fields is currently a public defender. On the days in question, she was inside the courthouse handling her caseload. Clutch Justice found no information that she handed out literature, solicited votes, distributed yard signs, or engaged voters in the lot.

Fields does campaign actively in public. Her campaign page documents a booth at the Berrien County Youth Fair in August, the kind of in-person outreach every judicial candidate does. Even if a campaign event was on her calendar later on the same day she was in court, that does not convert the morning’s parking into campaigning. Candidates are allowed to have a workday and a campaign day on the same date.

What Michigan Campaign Finance Law Actually Regulates

The provision most people have in mind when they say “no campaigning on government property” is Section 57 of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act, MCL 169.257. It prohibits a public body, or a person acting for one, from using public resources such as funds, personnel, office space, property, vehicles, and equipment to make a campaign contribution or expenditure. The Legislature directed that any ambiguity in Section 57 be read to favor strict neutrality by public bodies in elections.

The key word is public. Section 57 polices the government’s thumb on the scale. It is the reason a county cannot hang a candidate’s banner in the courthouse lobby or send employees to canvass on county time. It does not reach a private citizen’s private property, and Fields’s personal truck is private property. Section 57 also contains an equal access rule: when a public body opens a facility to one candidate or committee, it must offer the same opportunity to the others.

The Michigan Bureau of Elections has addressed sign placement directly. Its campaign sign guidance for committees states that the Campaign Finance Act does not dictate where signs can be placed. Placement is governed by local ordinances, zoning rules, and whoever owns the property, with the Michigan Department of Transportation separately controlling signs on state-owned property such as highway rights of way.

Berrien County’s own guidance to candidates says the same thing in local terms. The county tells candidates that time, place, and manner rules for signage are set by local ordinance, and it states that it does not accept campaign finance or signage violation complaints. Those go to the Michigan Department of State.

The Public Employee Question

Because Fields is a public defender, a second statute is relevant: Michigan’s Political Activities by Public Employees Act. It allows employees of local governments to run for office and take part in politics, but Section 4, MCL 15.404, bars them from actively engaging in that activity during the hours they are being paid for their public duties.

That rule has teeth, and Michigan candidates have been called out under it. It targets conduct such as campaigning during work hours, soliciting support on the job, or using paid time for campaign work. The statute speaks to active engagement. A truck sitting in a lot while its owner represents clients inside is not the owner actively engaging in anything. If Fields were walking the lot handing out palm cards between hearings while on the county payroll, that would be a different and legitimate question. Nothing in the tip alleges that.

The First Amendment Piece

Underneath the statutes sits the Constitution. Political speech about candidates for public office is the speech the First Amendment protects most strongly, and signs are speech. The Michigan Attorney General recognized as much decades ago in Opinion No. 6258, which concluded that municipalities could not impose a series of burdens on campaign signs posted on private property, noting that communication by signs and posters is a form of speech.

A sign on a vehicle is the moving version of a yard sign or a bumper sticker. The person displaying it, whether a candidate or a supporter, is speaking. That speech does not lose its protection when the car pulls into a lot the government happens to own.

Government does have more room to regulate speech on its own property than on private property. A courthouse parking lot is not a traditional public forum like a sidewalk or a park. Courts generally treat property like it as a nonpublic forum, where government may restrict expression, but only if the restriction is reasonable in light of the property’s purpose and does not favor one viewpoint over another.

Reasonable has a real meaning. In Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Minnesota’s ban on wearing “political” apparel inside polling places, one of the most protected spaces in American elections. The Court accepted that a state may keep its polling places free of campaign clutter, but held that the ban was unconstitutional because it gave election workers no objective, workable standard for deciding what counted as political. A vague rule enforced by whoever is offended that day fails even where the government’s interest is strongest.

Rules that single out signs because of what they say face additional scrutiny. In Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015), the Court held that a town sign code treating signs differently based on their message was content-based and presumptively unconstitutional, applying strict scrutiny in that setting. A nonpublic forum gives a county more latitude than the town in Reed had, but the principle reinforces the core point: a public body cannot simply declare all political expression off limits without a clear, defensible, evenly applied rule.

The Myrene Koch Test

The simplest way to check whether an accusation is principled is to swap the names. Suppose a Myrene Koch supporter, or Koch herself, drove a car with a large Koch banner to the Berrien County courthouse for a hearing, parked in the lot, went inside, and left when court was over. Would that be illegal campaigning?

It would not. It would be a person with a political opinion parking a car. The analysis is identical for Fields. A rule that applies only to the candidate a reader dislikes is not a rule. It is a preference, and the First Amendment’s viewpoint neutrality requirement exists to keep government from enforcing preferences.

A Useful Comparison From Federal Law

Federal employees operate under the Hatch Act, one of the strictest political activity laws in the country. It does not apply to Fields, who is a county public defender running in a state election, but the way federal regulators handle this exact scenario is instructive.

Hatch Act regulations at 5 C.F.R. 734.306 permit a federal employee to put a partisan political bumper sticker on a personal vehicle and park it in a federal parking lot or garage. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has advised that this holds even if the stickers support different candidates. In other words, the federal government, which bars its workforce from political activity in the federal workplace, has concluded that a personal vehicle carrying campaign material is not political activity in the workplace just because it is parked there.

The Office of Special Counsel has also cautioned employees against loading a vehicle with so much political material that it starts to look like a campaign mobile. That caution is worth acknowledging honestly. A sign of the size the reader describes is larger than a bumper sticker, and the line between “my car has my sign on it” and “I parked a billboard here” is a question of facts and intent. Under Michigan law and on the facts available, though, the line has not been crossed. This is the truck Fields drives every day, parked where she has business to conduct.

When the Answer Would Be Different

None of this means a courthouse lot is a free-for-all. The analysis changes when the facts change. Clutch Justice separates the scenarios this way:

On that last point, the Bureau of Elections has addressed vehicles specifically. Its polling place guidance allows a voter to park a vehicle bearing campaign signs or bumper stickers within 100 feet of the voter entrance only while that person is voting. Otherwise, such vehicles must stay at least 100 feet away. That rule applies to polling places on election days. An ordinary courthouse parking lot on an ordinary court day is not a polling place.

What Berrien County’s Own Policies Say

Berrien County has two administrative policies that touch this question, and both appear in the same board document. On April 3, 2025, the county’s Personnel and Human Services Committee brought Resolution P2504140 to the Board of Commissioners, recommending revisions to Policy ADM-1090, “Political Activities of Employees.” The policy dates to 1985, had not been updated since 2003, and carries a revision date of February 13, 2025. The resolution states the update was needed to expand the policy’s treatment of public employees participating in political activities.

ADM-1090 tracks the state statute. It bars county employees from actively engaging in political activity during the hours they are compensated for their public duties, and it spells out examples: wearing campaign badges, passing out campaign material, and other related campaign activity. The 2025 revision added a parallel instruction that elected officials should not ask or allow employees to campaign on paid time, including by marching in parades or events. The policy cites the state law as Act 19 of 1976; the statute is Public Act 169 of 1976, codified at MCL 15.401 and following.

The revised policy closes by restating a rule from a separate county policy, ADM-5190: no signs, including political signs, advertisements, or flyers may be posted or distributed in a county facility or on county property unless directly connected to county functions, and signs placed in violation will be removed.

If, as a public defender, Fields is a county employee, ADM-1090 governs her conduct on the clock. Nothing reported to Clutch Justice suggests she wore campaign gear, handed out material, or did campaign work during court hours. Under the policy’s own examples, she was doing the opposite: working.

ADM-5190 is the provision the tip was really reaching for, and its wording matters. It addresses signs and flyers that are posted or distributed in county facilities or on county property, and its stated remedy is that the county will remove them. That language describes freestanding material, a yard sign staked on the courthouse lawn or a flyer taped inside a hallway, that the county can pick up and take away. It does not mention vehicles or parking lots, and its removal remedy makes little sense applied to a sign attached to someone’s personal truck. The county cannot remove a sign from a private vehicle the way it removes a sign from its lawn.

Two further points keep this in perspective. First, ADM-5190 and ADM-1090 are internal administrative policies, not criminal statutes or election law. A breach of a county property policy, even if one occurred, would not make conduct “illegal campaigning.” Second, if the county ever read ADM-5190 to cover campaign signs on vehicles parked by people with court business, it would have to apply that reading to every candidate and every supporter equally, and it would face the clarity and reasonableness requirements the Supreme Court applied in Mansky.

Why This Tip Still Mattered

The reader was not wrong to care. Judicial candidates should be held to a high standard, voters are entitled to ask whether a would-be judge follows the rules, and courthouses should be neutral ground. Those are good instincts.

What the tip got wrong was the law. Campaign rules in Michigan are aimed mostly at the misuse of public power and public money, not at private citizens with opinions. A candidate driving her own truck to her own job is not a scandal, and treating it as one would cheapen the real accountability questions this race, and every race, deserves.

Clutch Justice reports on judicial candidates based on documented records, not on which candidate a tipster prefers. Checking this allegation and finding it does not hold up is part of that work, not a departure from it.