Independent John Michael of Auburn is seeking election to the office of governor of Maine.

He would not make a suitable governor, and we do not support his candidacy.

However, we do support the reality that missing a deadline by seconds can be understood, even accepted.

On Friday, Michael dashed into the office of the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices less than a minute after the deadline had passed to submit 2,500 signatures, each matched to at $5 check to the Clean Election Fund, seeking qualification as a clean election candidate. That qualification, if it’s earned, will entitle Michael to claim between $400,000 and $1.2 million in taxpayer money to conduct his gubernatorial campaign.

Friday was the second of two deadlines.

Michael met the initial June 2 deadline to turn in 2,500 signatures, and he – and every candidate – is entitled to 10 additional days to verify the signatures with various town clerks across the state. Michael says he has spent that time doing just that and, while not impossible, it’s tough to get that work done.

We do not know whether the signatures he has gathered are valid. The ethics commission is checking on that now, and if the signatures are inadequate, he doesn’t deserve the designation as a clean elections candidate.

However, if the signatures are valid, the fact that he was less than a minute late to submit verified signatures for a secondary deadline is not enough to bounce him from public funding.

Especially when, in less than a minute, Michael could access a May 4 Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling that permits signatures gathered in support of putting the Taxpayer Bill of Rights on the November general election ballot to be counted even though 4,024 signatures were submitted three days after the deadline. Although 54,127 signatures in support of TABOR were submitted by the Oct. 21 deadline, the remaining signatures were delivered the following Monday due to an “oversight.”

We don’t support TABOR. We don’t support John Michael. However, if the court has ruled that the state must include the late signatures on TABOR in the official count that puts the measure on the ballot, it would not be a stretch to imagine that a court could ultimately rule – after a parade of appeals and lawsuits – that signatures submitted less than a minute late in support of a clean election candidate would be accepted as favorably.

The difference in these two circumstances is that the deadline for the TABOR signatures is a constitutional deadline, and the deadline for the clean elections candidacy is statutory. An argument could be made that Michael failed to meet statutory rule and it’s just his tough luck that town clerks, traffic or anything else prevented him from making deadline. The other candidates who are seeking public funding would be happy if he were disqualified, anyway.

There is no doubt that Michael should have been punctual in submitting his paperwork and whatever excuse he may have for being tardy is weak. He certainly knew of the deadline, and other candidates managed to make it with ease.

Rules are rules, but the reality is that not every clock is tuned to within a breadth of a second of international time, and people are late for all kinds of appointments and deadlines. Less than a minute late isn’t such a horrid offense, especially when the folks organizing the TABOR petition were more than 3,840 minutes late in submitting their completed paperwork, which the court considers timely enough.

The ethics commission meets today to consider Michael’s application for clean election funding. If Michael did, indeed, gather valid supportive signatures from 2,500 Mainers who were all willing to write him a $5 check in time for the initial June 2 deadline, but he simply failed to meet the verification deadline by a matter of seconds, the ethics committee should side with the 2,500 Mainers who want to publicly fund Michael in this race.