LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A lawsuit filed by a group representing an effort to roll back recent changes to the Arkansas ballot initiative process has been dismissed by the state Supreme Court.
The suit filed with the Arkansas Supreme Court alleged that Secretary of State Cole Jester’s office rejected the signatures submitted by Protect AR Rights for trivial reasons. It also claimed Jester delayed informing the group about the faults he found, thereby denying them time to obtain additional signatures on the petitions needed to place the initiative on the November ballot.
Protect AR Rights fails to meet signature requirement for November ballot initiative
Protect AR Rights stated it submitted 108,837 signatures on July 3, the submission deadline. Jester rejected multiple signatures, which put the group below the required 90,704 signatures. He cited improper titles on some petition pages, duplicate signatures, or signers “illegally signing multiple times.”
The group shared a statement after the dismissal, saying it “closes the legal path for placing the amendment on the November ballot, but it does not end the broader fight to protect Arkansas’s citizen initiative process.”…