Secretary of state rejects Ballot Measure Rights Amendment petition - Talk Business & Politics
A proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment that would make citizen-proposed laws and constitutional amendments a fundamental right has been rejected by Secretary of State Cole Jester, who alleged “many troubling irregularities”. . .
A proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment that would make citizen-proposed laws and constitutional amendments a fundamental right has been rejected by Secretary of State Cole Jester, who alleged “many troubling irregularities” in the petitions submitted to place the measure on the November ballot. Protect AR Rights, the campaign backing the proposal, said in a statement it is consulting with its legal team “to determine the appropriate next steps. ”Boxloads of signed petitions were turned in at the Arkansas State Capitol on July 3, which backers said included 108,837 signatures. Jester’s office needed to verify at least 90,704 valid signatures for the measure to qualify for the November ballot. In a letter to the amendment’s sponsor Thursday, Jester, a Republican, said the petition failed to meet requirements under state law and alleged widespread problems. He said 87 petition parts were for an entirely different proposed amendment, 2,779 signatures were duplicates, 15 notary acknowledgments appeared to have been completed before canvassers signed the petitions and that 504 entries appeared to contain forged information or signatures. Jester also said none of the petition pages contained the ballot title approved by the Arkansas Attorney General’s office. Instead, most pages used the popular name “The Ballot Measure Rights Amendment of 2026” rather than the approved title, “The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment. ” He said those differences made every petition part legally invalid, resulting in zero countable signatures under Arkansas law. Even if those issues had not independently disqualified the petition, Jester said at least 2,453 petition parts would have been rejected because of notary or canvasser defects, leaving only 83,211 valid signatures — 7,493 short of the threshold needed to begin verification. Jester wrote that state law prohibits his office from counting signatures gathered by canvassers who violate laws governing canvassing, perjury, forgery or fraudulent practices. He said the petition submission contained evidence those laws were violated and included an appendix with examples. Protect AR Rights said in its statement that the secretary of state’s letter underscores why this fight matters. “Arkansas’s citizen ballot initiative process has become so burdened with unnecessary obstacles that it threatens the very constitutional right it is supposed to protect. Our elected leaders should be working to empower voters, not disenfranchise them,” the statement said. Related