Four staffers in former Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter’s office were arraigned last week on election fraud. McCotter has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, although Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette charged him with being “asleep” while the fraud was perpetuated.

What is especially amazing about this story is the amount of work that the staffers put into perpetuating the fraud when they could easily have collected signatures at public and campaign events for an incumbent and popular Congressman.

Only 244 out of the 1,800 signatures that were submitted in May were valid. Now the attorney general’s office is suggesting that the fraud extends back to the 2010. It might even go back further, but probably stops at least at 2006. That is because it was some of the signatures used in 2006 were recycled onto the 2012 petition.

“Cut and paste jobs that would make an elementary art teacher cringe,” Schuette said of the shoddy work.

It is puzzling to see one staffer agree to cut and paste, but four? It would seem that there would be enough brainpower between the four of them to realize that cutting and pasting might eventually get the attention of election officials. Presumably, since they succeeded in hiding their deeds in 2010, they figured they could get away with it again — typical criminal thinking.

This attempt to fake the signatures is amateurish and looks more like something out of a junior high school election than a Congressional office. Getting signatures for anything is a relatively easy task. As Schuette suggests, if they had put the effort into signature gathering that they did into fraud, then they would have put McCotter on the ballot.