The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that an abortion-rights amendment was ineligible for the November ballot, agreeing with state officials that organizers of the effort had failed to submit all of the required paperwork.
The measure appeared all but set to proceed last month when organizers announced they had submitted more than 101,000 signatures in favor of it, well above the minimum 90,704 signatures required to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
But John Thurston, the secretary of state, rejected the petition outright, saying that organizers had failed to correctly submit a sworn statement confirming that paid canvassers had been instructed on how to collect signatures.
The organization behind the measure, Arkansans for Limited Government, sued to revive the petition and force state officials to count the signatures. While the court required a count of the signatures collected by unpaid volunteers, that total — 87,675 — came in short, Mr. Thurston’s office said.
On Thursday, the court upheld Mr. Thurston’s decision to reject the petition. The Supreme Court also rejected the group’s argument that it was entitled under Arkansas law to an additional 30 days to make up the difference.
“We find that the secretary correctly refused to count the signatures collected by paid canvassers because the sponsor failed to file the paid canvasser training certification,” the majority wrote.
In an attempt to appeal to centrists and libertarians in the state, Arkansans for Limited Government crafted a ballot proposal that did not go as far as some other states. Current law only allows for abortions if a pregnant woman’s life is at risk because of a medical emergency; the proposal would have allowed for abortions up to 18 weeks after fertilization and additional exceptions for incest, rape and when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb.
The majority opinion came on the day of the deadline for state officials to finalize the November ballot. Three of the seven justices — Chief Justice John Dan Kemp, along with Justices Karen R. Baker and Courtney Hudson — dissented.
“During the electoral process, my staff maintained the highest professional standards and did not allow partisan politics or misinformation to deter them from their duty to comply with the law,” Mr. Thurston said. “I am dedicated to my calling to serve Arkansans and will continue to do so.”
Of the nearly dozen states where organizers were looking to voters to restore some abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Arkansas presented perhaps the most difficult environment.
“Despite this infuriating result, our fight isn’t over,” the organization said in a statement. “We can’t — and won’t — rest until Arkansas women have access to safe, standard health care and the autonomy to make decisions about their bodies free from governmental interference.”
“We will remember this in November,” the group added.
Arkansas’s deeply conservative and evangelical base of voters makes it one of the few states where a majority of voters do not support some abortion access. And anti-abortion groups, as well as allies of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, rallied in opposition to the proposed amendment.
Most of the people collecting signatures for the group were unpaid volunteers — a coalition of doctors worried about the effect of current abortion law on their patients, and women furious over the end of Roe v. Wade. But the organization also relied on some paid canvassers.
The organization regularly filed the required paperwork confirming that it had instructed paid canvassers on how to collect signatures, records with Mr. Thurston’s office show. However the last filing, on June 27, was not included with the final submission of petitions on July 5. State officials also questioned whether the person who signed the paperwork had the authority to do so, given that she was not a formal sponsor of the ballot process.
Abortion rights organizers argued that the signatures should not be automatically dismissed because the paperwork had been submitted before the deadline. At the very least, they told the court, they should be granted 30 days to gather more signatures since they had submitted more than the minimum required.
“This is a win for the rule of law in Arkansas and for those who have followed the rules for years to participate in the state’s ballot initiative process,” Tim Griffin, the attorney general, said in a statement.
Two other groups seeking to put proposals on the ballot — one related to expanding access to medical marijuana and another related to casino development — also joined the case to side with the abortion rights group. They argued that Mr. Thurston’s office, backed by the attorney general, had inconsistently applied the rules surrounding paid canvassers.
The dissenting justices also acknowledged the office’s seemingly unequal application of the rules, and said they would have allowed the abortion rights group additional time to collect signatures and appointed a special master to evaluate the application of the law. (The majority of the justices noted that there was never a request for a special master and ultimately, “the facts necessary to decide this case were undisputed.”)
“Why are the respondent and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” wrote Justice Baker, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Hudson. “The majority has succeeded in its efforts to change the law in order to deprive the voters of the opportunity to vote on this issue, which is not the proper role of this court.”
The post Arkansas Supreme Court Denies Bid to Get Abortion Measure on the Ballot appeared first on New York Times.
