A voting initiative backed by progressive activists won’t be on the ballot this fall in Arizona after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that backers failed to provide a valid mailing address to receive certified mail.
The court remanded it to the trial court to determine how many signatures would be invalidated, and after a last-minute dispute between the two courts over how to count the signatures, the Arizona Supreme Court stated on Friday that Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections lacked the required amount of qualifying signatures.
“We are very pleased that the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling that Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections failed to gather enough lawful signatures to qualify for the ballot,” said Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) President and Executive Director Scot Mussi, whose organization filed the lawsuit against the initiative. “This radical initiative imported 60 different provisions from Washington, D.C. that would have increased fraud, harmed small business, and empowered special interests. They spent over $7 million trying to buy their way onto the ballot, and they failed.”
After the Arizona Supreme Court issued its first decision on Wednesday, remanding it to the trial court, that judge, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish, announced on Thursday that based on his revised analysis, the initiative had 2,281 signatures over the required threshold of 239,926, so it qualified for the ballot.
But AFEC appealed, and the Arizona Supreme Court stated that they were “unable to verify the invalidity rate used by the trial court,” so they ordered Mikitish to show his calculations before 11 a.m. on Friday.
Read the rest of the article at The Arizona Sun Times
