Court Opinion

ID: 9770970
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:26:52.369598+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:37:37.455564
License: Public Domain

Tom Glaze, Justice, concurring. I concur and write on points not mentioned in the majority opinion. First, it is well settled that the states have an interest in protecting the integrity, fairness, and efficiency of their ballots and election processes. See Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351 (1997); Bullock v. Carter, 405 U.S. 134 (1972); but see Meyer v. Grant, 486 U.S. 414 (1988) (where Colorado law prohibiting paid circulators of initiative petitions held to have abridged petitioners’ right to engage in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments because, among other things, the state failed to demonstrate placing the statutory burden on the petitioners to hire circulators would protect the integrity of its initiative process). In the present case, the Arkansas statutes with which the Hoyle petitioners were required to comply in gathering voters’ signatures are entirely reasonable so as to ensure the State’s initiative process will not be abused. That being said, the majority court quite properly excluded signatures which resulted from canvassers and notaries who consciously disregarded Arkansas law. Consequently, those signatures were falsely obtained and justifiably excluded by this court’s master. On a second point, Hoyle suggests the Secretary of State erred when she excluded 765 signatures of persons who were not registered to vote when they signed the initiative petition. He claims that while Amendment 7 to the Arkansas Constitution requires the signer of an initiative petition to be a “legal voter,” the signer need only be a “qualified elector.” Hoyle contends a qualified voter is a person eighteen years old or older, who resides in the State, and has committed no felony. Mr. Hoyle is wrong. Act 963 of 1995, compiled as Ark. Code Ann. 7-1-101(10) (Supp. 1997), defines “qualified elector” as a person who holds the qualifications of an elector and who is registered pursuant to the Arkansas Constitution Amendment 51 (Arkansas’s Voter Registration Amendment). Quite obviously, if initiative-petition signers were not required to be registered voters, the Secretary of State would have no fist of voters to verify petitions circulated pursuant to Amendment 7. Finally, the majority opinion cites Page v. McCuen, 318 Ark. 342, 884 S.W.2d 951 (1994), and Scott v. Priest, 326 Ark. 328, 932 S.W.2d 746 (1996), wherein we noted the court’s displeasure in being placed in the position of reviewing initiative petitions and proposals at the last minute. In Scott, we noted that the General Assembly had acted responsibly to correct this last-minute review problem by referring to the voters at the November 5, 1996 General Election a measure that would have provided a procedure that would assure voters that the petitions they signed would actually place the measure on the General Election ballot, if the sponsors obtained the necessary number of signatures. The voters defeated that proposed measure at the polls in the 1996 election by a vote of 368,460 against and 317,970 for. Exactly why the voters rejected this referendum measure in 1996 is unclear. What is clear is that Arkansas’s laws dealing with initiative and referendum measures remain restrictive, at least to the extent that no early review can be made by this court so a proposed measure can be assured placement on the General Election ballot for a vote of the people. As the court forecast in Page, until appropriate action is taken to correct the problems attendant to proposals submitted under Amendment 7, Arkansas citizens can continue to expect measures to be removed from the ballot immediately prior to the election. The options available to correct this continuing problem are few. One, this court, which admittedly added its restrictive interpretation to Amendment 7 by a 4-3 decision in Finn v. McCuen, 303 Ark. 418, 798 S.W.2d 34 (1990), could be asked to revisit that decision. In Finn, this court considered the validity of Act 280 of 1989 which provided a reasonable time table for all questions concerning a ballot tide or popular name be resolved. Our court interpreted Act 280 to be in conflict with Amendment 7 and held the Act unconstitutional, but there were three written dissents seeing the Act differendy. Eventually, the General Assembly referred a proposed measure, which was almost identical to Act 280, in an effort to provide a short constitutional time table to correct the late-review aspect of Arkansas’s initiative process, as interpreted by our court, but the voters rejected that measure. Thus, a second option is that the General Assembly might again refer another proposed measure to the Arkansas voters so the voters can have a second chance to consider the restrictive-initiative process problem. A third avenue, of course, is that a First and Fourteenth Amendment challenge may be brought against Amendment 7 itself, to determine whether Arkansas’s initiative measure process is presently so burdensome that it fails to meet constitutional muster under the United States Constitution. Whatever option is eventually taken to obtain a fair initiative process under Arkansas law, I renew my remarks that the signature-gathering aspects of Arkansas’s election laws are reasonable and are properly designed to ensure that sponsors of initiative proposal measures are honestly and fairly placed on the General Election ballot. Because those Arkansas laws were consciously ignored in this case, I have no hesitancy in joining the majority court in holding the Hoyle petition to be insufficient. Corbin, J., joins this opinion.