The Associated Press reports Ruling puts Arizona voting access initiative on life support:
An Arizona voter initiative that would expand voting access and roll back tightened election laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Doug Ducey was teetering on the edge of failure Friday after a judge disqualified tens of thousands of signatures backers turned in to qualify it for the November ballot.
It is based upon the ticky-tack requirements of a GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression law passed in 2017 by the GQP-controlled Arizona legislature and signed by Gov. Ducey to effectively nullify your constitutional right to citizens initiatives and referendums, making these kinds of B.S. legal challenges possible. HB2244 overturns not only statutes but Supreme Court case law, which holds that efforts by voters to propose their own laws need to be only in “substantial compliance” with election laws to go on the ballot. Under HB2244, any measure not in “strict compliance” could be challenged and stopped before voters ever get a chance to weigh in.
(A similar challenge is occuring in Michigan. Opponents file challenges to Michigan abortion rights, voting rights ballot measures: “Opponents of the Reproductive Freedom for All petition, which seeks to amend the state Constitution to protect reproductive freedom and Michiganders’ right to make and carry out decisions relating to pregnancy, filed a challenge arguing that a spacing issue in the petition text is reason to reject the petition.” “According to Section 168.482 of Michigan’s election code: The heading of each part of the petition must be printed in capital letters in 14-point boldface type; the 100-word summary must be printed in 12-point type; and the full text of the proposed amendment must be printed in 8-point type.” Michigan still follows the substantial compliance doctrine, however.)
An attorney representing opponents of the Free and Fair Elections measure said his analysis shows the measure now falling about 10,000 signatures short. Meanwhile, the backers’ attorney said they were still analyzing the complicated ruling and that it wasn’t clear if enough signatures survived. The secretary of state was awaiting final verification of signatures by county recorders.
The ruling released late Thursday night is the third handed down this week in legal challenges to voter initiatives filed in July. The two previous rulings rejected challenges to a measure limiting so-called predatory debt collection [Predatory Debt Collection Practices Act initiative] and for one that would require people who fund political campaigns through nonprofit groups to be identified [Voter’s Right to Know initiative].
Opponents of those initiatives are appealing directly to the Arizona Supreme Court which faces an Aug. 25 deadline to issue rulings so election officials can get ballots to the printers. The secretary of state and recorders says signature reviews show the debt measure will make the ballot, while reviews on the other two measures are due next week.
Attorney Korey Langhofer, who represents the pro-business Arizona Free Enterprise Club [and is the attorney for the Arizona Republican Party] in the challenge to the election measure, said appeals are likely by his group and the initiative’s backers to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish’s ruling.
Mikitish weighed challenges in 32 different areas of registrations, paperwork and eligibility of paid circulators who gathered an estimated 475,000 signatures. The secretary of state rejected about 75,000 of them, leaving nearly 400,000 for a review by county recorders.
The Free Enterprise Club’s challenge has apparently disqualified enough of those for the measure to fall below the nearly 238,000 needed to make the ballot, according to Langhofer’s estimate. But he said he’ll likely appeal some aspects of the ruling allowing some signatures to be counted, and expects the measure’s proponents to appeal the disqualification of some of the petition circulators.
The Free and Fair Elections measure changes a slew of election laws. It specifically blocks the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, an avenue some Republicans explored after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state in 2020. It also guarantees ballot privacy and bars handing election materials or ballots over to outside groups like the state Senate did after 2020, expands voting access, mandates that all voters can go to any polling site, extends early voting and limits lobbyists ability to wine and dine lawmakers.
The measure also would eliminate the “strict compliance” legal standard that led Mikitish to disqualify many of the petition sheets. The GOP-controlled Legislature required that standard for initiatives in 2017, making it easier to throw them out for relatively minor paperwork errors. That’s because, as Mikitish noted in his ruling, it “requires nearly perfect compliance with constitutional and statutory mandates.”
The Ducey-packed Arizona Supreme Court has not been favorable to voter inititiatives. On Friday the Supreme Court finally released its written opinion for its order in April striking down the citizens initiative Invest In Education Act, Prop. 208 (2020) which would have reversed massive tax cuts for the wealthy that their lickspittle lackeys in the GQP-controlled legislature and Gov. Ducey passed.
The Associated Press reports, Arizona Supreme Court says voters can’t repeal tax cuts:
The [Ducey-packed] Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that tax cuts or increases enacted by the Legislature can never be blocked by opponents using the state constitution’s referendum power, with the rare exception of a tax that funds a completely new state department.
The written opinion released Friday explains the reasoning behind the court’s April 21 decision reinstating a massive income tax cut enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature last year and signed by GOP Gov. Doug Ducey. The court reversed a lower court decision that said the tax cuts could be referred to the ballot because they did not appropriate money.
“A revenue measure is exempt from referendum, regardless of the increase or decrease in revenue, provided it is for the support and maintenance of existing departments of the state government and state institutions,” Justice John Lopez wrote for the five-justice majority.
Arizona’s constitution lets voters block newly enacted laws by collecting signatures from 5% of qualified voters. If they do, the law is put on hold until the next general election. But it exempts measures necessary for immediate health and safety and those that appropriate money for government operations.
Justices Bill Montgomery and James Beene dissented, saying that the constitution only exempts measures passed with an emergency clause from the referendum. They would have allowed the tax cuts to go to the ballot this November, where voters could decide whether to accept or reject the nearly $2 billion per year cut that mainly benefits the wealthy.
Lawyers for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, a conservative pro-business group that pushes for lower taxes and regulations, argued the state constitution does not allow referrals for measures that provide for the “support and maintenance” of state government and that the tax cut bill falls into that category.
Lopez agreed, saying that the constitution’s exemption from voter referendums for legislation providing for “the support and maintenance” of government is broader than just an appropriation. And he said it is not a stretch to conclude that even a tax cut fits into the “support and maintenance” category, saying the lack of a specific definition in the constitution “perhaps reflects the founders’ wisdom.”
“Conditioning the referendum exemption on the revenue effect of a support and maintenance measure is a fool’s errand that raises myriad questions concerning the temporal scope of the inquiry and rests on the vagaries of economic projections,” Lopez wrote.
Ducey and other Republicans have argued that tax cuts boost business prospects and can lead to higher state tax revenue in the long run.
The high court has intervened repeatedly in recent years to block voters from repealing or enacting their own laws. Lopez appeared to defend the decision in his opinion, writing that the court ruling was based “on the founders’ original plain meaning, as expressed in the text, concerning the meaning and scope of the referendum power to challenge tax laws.”
He also said residents do have recourse: they can pass an initiative [only to have it overturned by a Republican Supreme Court] or elect different lawmakers. But all tax increases take a 2/3 majority to enact [Arizona Two-thirds For Taxes Amendment, Proposition 108 (1992)], and the court declared unconstitutional a tax increase on the wealthy to fund education that was approved by voters in 2020, although they left it to a lower court to officially pronounce Proposition 208 dead.
Ducey, a Republican who pushed for an expansion [packing] of the Supreme Court [over the objection of the Chief Justice] in 2016 that has allowed him to appoint six of the seven justices, backed the massive tax cut and hailed the court’s decision when it was handed down.
A quid pro quo.
UPDATE:
.@AZFairElections says it expects to be on the November ballot after signature verification left it with 298,000 valid signatures.
The Supreme Court could change that, but backers are confident they won't. pic.twitter.com/BzDny7IqCW
— Jim Small (@JimSmall) August 24, 2022
Judge Lopez did get one thing right: if you want to put an end to this Republican assault on your constitutional right to citizens intiaitives and referendums, you must “elect different lawmakers” – vote out every one of these authoritarian Republicans who have no respect for voters, and elect Democrats who will reverse their Jim Crow 2.0 GQP voter suppression and disenfranchisement of voters.
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Pardon my cynicism, but I can’t help thinking that Montgomery’s and/or Keene’s dissent was faux and that if the vote was closer, one of both of them would have been part of the majority.
I think your intuition is right.