The Arkansas Supreme Court issued a new order Friday in the lawsuit filed by organizers behind the Arkansas Abortion Amendment, setting a schedule for briefs to be filed in the weeks ahead. Though the ruling says little about how the justices will handle the underlying legal questions, it shows they at least plan to fully hear arguments from both abortion advocates and state Attorney General Tim Griffin on whether the amendment should be disqualified due to a minor paperwork error.
That is itself another small victory for Arkansans for Limited Government, the group hoping to place the proposed constitutional amendment before voters in November. Griffin had moved for the court to dismiss the case.
“We are again validated by the Court’s refusal to dismiss this case as the Attorney General requested,” Rebecca Bobrow, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement. “As we’ve said previously, we believe we have fully complied with the law governing ballot initiatives and we intend to demonstrate that again to the Supreme Court. This fight is not over.”
The justices ordered Griffin to file an answer to Arkansans for Limited Government’s complaint by Monday. Both the petitioners and Griffin are ordered to file briefs by Friday, Aug. 2, and reply briefs by the following Friday, Aug. 9.
Abortion organizers turned in more than 102,000 signatures to Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston’s office by a July 5 deadline — more than the 90,704 required to qualify for the ballot. Thurston rejected the petition on July 10, saying Arkansans for Limited Government had failed to include a piece of paperwork with their petition related to paid canvassers. Though most of the group’s signatures (about 88,000) were gathered by volunteers, it also hired paid canvassers who collected another 14,000. Arkansans for Limited Government will need at least some of those paid canvasser signatures to count in order to meet the minimum threshold to make the ballot.
Backed by the attorney general, Thurston initially argued that the paperwork issue disqualified the entire petition and refused to begin the counting process for even the volunteer signatures. The group sued Thurston on July 16, and it scored a small win on Tuesday when the Supreme Court ordered Thurston to count the volunteer signatures after all. But the justices did not weigh in on what should happen with the paid canvasser signatures.
Thurston’s office finished counting volunteer signatures yesterday. (It had already counted the paid canvasser signatures earlier, before Thurston rejected the petition.) With that preliminary step out of the way, the court apparently now wants to fully explore the more difficult legal issues that underly the case. (For more background than you need, read our previous reporting on the legal twists and turns here, here, here and here.)
As with the order on Tuesday, today’s order included a dissent from three of the court’s seven justices, Courtney Hudson, Karen Baker and Chief Justice Dan Kemp. They said on Tuesday that they would have gone farther than the other justices and given Arkansans for Limited Government a limited “cure period” — a window of time to collect additional signatures. The same justices said in Friday’s order that they would have appointed a “special master to resolve factual issues raised in the original action petition.” (In past cases involving ballot initiative petitions, the Supreme Court has sometimes appointed an expert “special master” to review disputes over signatures and other issues.)
Jaime Land, a spokesperson for Thurston’s office, said that staff won’t proceed to the next stage of the process — verifying the validity of signatures — until it receives further instructions from the court.
Asked whether Arkansans for Limited Government can now collect signatures in anticipation of a possible cure period down the road, Land said nothing in the statute precludes them from doing so.
Ballots for the November election are expected to be printed by Aug. 22, Land said.