SPENCER WILLEMS
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Arkansas voters will decide whether to raise the state’s minimum wage.
The Arkansas Supreme Court on Monday ruled unanimously that Give Arkansas a Raise Now, the group backing the ballot measure, had submitted enough signatures to earn a spot on the Nov. 4 ballot, even though thousands of those signatures were eventually declared invalid.
Jackson Stephens Jr., the son of the co-founder of Stephens Inc., had sued to block a vote, arguing that the secretary of state’s office should have tossed signatures on petitions with forged notary signatures, an action that would have left the increase’s sponsors several thousand signatures short of the threshold needed to qualify for an extension early in the process.
Once officials found that the initial signatures submitted exceeded the 62,507 signatures required to put an issue on the ballot, the secretary of state’s office gave Give Arkansas a Raise Now a 30-day “cure period” to either address faulty signatures or collect more while officials verified the signatures.
Ultimately, the wage increase organizers submitted 89,790 valid signatures.
Stephens’ suit didn’t argue that the organizers didn’t have enough signatures at the end, but instead claimed that Martin shouldn’t have given them a 30-day extension to reach 89,790 signatures.
On Monday, Justice Paul Danielson penned an opinion that rejected Stephens’ arguments, saying that though the signatures were invalid for the purpose of a final count, they were good enough for Martin’s office’s initial count.
“While Stephens would have this court hold that fraud is an appropriate consideration for purposes of the [secretary of state’s] initial-count determination, it simply is not,” Danielson wrote. “The initial count is just that — an initial count of the signatures submitted at the time of filing and prior to any signature verification.”
An attorney with Give Arkansas a Raise Now, David Couch, said he was pleased by the justices ruling.
“They really focused on the signatures of the people that signed the petition and not anything else. … [The ruling] respects the signatures of the people who sign the petition and not the canvasser who did something inappropriate,” Couch said. “That was the big tug of war [in the case]. What’s more important, the signatures of the people or the signatures of the notary?”
In a statement issued Monday night, Stephens said he was “very disappointed” by the court’s ruling.
“It is shameful that, according to our Supreme Court, fraud is not a consideration in this matter of public trust, and now the whole ballot initiative process is open to fraud,” he wrote. “It is even more shocking that there wasn’t a single dissent, indicating that all seven justices embraced this decision and its long-term implications on future generations.”
Democrats across the state celebrated the ruling, which many feel will help increase turnout for Democratic leaning voters.
Democratic Party spokesman Patrick Burgwinkle said the ruling just added another dimension to the factors driving what they hope will be a high turnout for a midterm election.
“The minimum wage [issue] is a great way to get Arkansans out to vote. It enjoys overwhelming support,” Burgwinkle said. “One hundred seventy-five thousand Arkansans will be helped by raising the minimum wage. That’s a big motivator not only for those people to go out and vote themselves a raise. ... but also Arkansans who think $6.25 is just too low [to live on].”
Democrat Sen. Mark Pryor, who is seeking re-election against Rep. Tom Cotton, was the first Arkansas statewide elected official to support the increase, and said in a statement that he was pleased to see the challenge made by Stephens — who is also the chair of the conservative Club for Growth — fail.
The Club for Growth has been a big financial supporter of Cotton’s candidacy.
“This decision was the right one for hardworking Arkansas families,” Pryor said. “Now it’s up to voters to turn out and support a pay raise for 170,000 families struggling to make ends meet.”
While Democrats celebrated, chair of the Arkansas Republican Party, Doyle Webb, said his party had no cause for concern.
“I don’t see [the ruling] having any impact [on Republican success],” Webb said. “The leaders of our ticket, both [Cotton] and Asa Hutchinson, they’ve both said they’re voting for that provision. … Our focus is not really on minimum wage in the long run, it’s [about] giving great jobs to Arkansans so they don’t have to live on minimums.”
Stephens’ complaint argued that the 8,501 signatures counted by Martin’s office were fraudulently notarized and should have been tossed during the Secretary of State’s initial count, thus preventing Couch’s group from an extension.
He also argued that by submitting the petitions on July 7, sponsors ran afoul of the state constitution, which states all petitions for initiated acts need to be submitted to the secretary of state’s office no later than four months before the election, a deadline that fell on July 4 this year.
The high court appointed a retired Court of Appeals judge, John Robbins, as a special master in the case to help vet Stephens’ claims of fraud.
In early October, Robbins found that the 8,501 challenged signatures were invalid, but not “facially invalid,” meaning that on first look, they looked like legitimate signatures from Arkansas voters and appeared on petitions that complied with Arkansas election laws.
Other types of flaws with petitions, or signatures, could be corrected in a cure period.
Despite arguments from Stephens that Martin’s office should not have granted a 30-day cure period, and that the court was at risk of legitimizing fraud in the state’s ballot-initiative process, the Supreme Court sided with Robbins’ findings that those signatures were facially valid and the extension was properly granted.
Stephens arguments cited case law from old challenges to acts involving forgery but Danielson pointed out that those successful challenges only occurred with the final count made by the secretary of state’s office and not the initial count.
The timeliness argument
— which was used in an unsuccessful attempt to remove a constitutional amendment from the ballot that would allow the statewide sale and distribution of alcohol — was also rejected by Danielson.
In addition to their ruling, the Supreme Court also ordered Stephens to pay $189 to Martin’s office as well as $90 to Give Arkansas a Raise Now for the costs of legal briefs.