The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a pro-abort constitutional amendment will not be on the ballot in November because the organizers decided following the law was just too much trouble. The proposed amendment would declare open season on babies up to 18 weeks for any purpose and until birth for a laundry list of reasons that are sufficiently vague as to make abortion unrestricted.
The amendment’s sponsor, an AstroTurfed, single-issue pro-abort group called Arkansans for Limited Government, violated state law by using unauthorized paid canvassers to collect signatures. On July 5, the organization turned on what they purported to be over 101,000 signatures collected in 53 counties, more than meeting the statutory requirement of 90,704 representing 50 counties to put the amendment on the ballot.
When Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston reviewed the petitions, he determined that Arkansans for Limited Government had not followed the law by using paid canvassers and ignoring the requirement to provide them with training and certify that training. As a result, he rejected the proposed amendment.
The group that submitted the petitions Friday did not submit an affidavit identifying paid canvassers by name, as required by state law, Thurston wrote in a Wednesday letter to Lauren Cowles, executive director of Arkansans for Limited Government, the ballot question committee supporting the proposed constitutional amendment.
State law also requires ballot question committees to provide “a copy of the most recent edition of the Secretary of State’s initiatives and referenda handbook to each paid canvasser” and to explain to canvassers the legal requirements for soliciting signatures before canvassing begins.
AFLG did not fulfill these requirements while the sponsors of other proposed ballot measures did, Thurston wrote.
The AFLG appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which ordered a recount of the signatures. That recount certified 87.675 signatures as legitimate and Thurston’s decision was upheld. The AFLG went back to court claiming, among other things that Thurston had discriminated against the amendment.
AFLG argued that Thurston’s motivation for rejecting the proposed abortion amendment is ideological. Arkansas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group publicly opposed to the amendment, endorsed Thurston’s 2022 reelection campaign, and Thurston donated $315.75 to the organization on Jan. 4, according to campaign finance documents included in the brief.
Thurston was among the Republican elected officials who participated in the March for Life, the group’s annual anti-abortion rally, on State Capitol grounds later in January.
“The Secretary’s viewpoint is clear. He wants to keep the Amendment off the ballot,” the petitioners wrote in the 118-page brief. “Doing so furthers his anti-abortion personal beliefs and political interests. … This viewpoint discrimination infringes petitioners’ First Amendment rights and harms the integrity of the ballot initiative process.”
Today’s ruling seems to have put the issue to rest for this election cycle.
“We find that the secretary correctly refused to count the signatures collected by paid canvassers because the sponsor failed to file the paid canvasser training certification,” the majority wrote.
Never fear; they will be back.
This is the new strategy of the pro-abort movement. Having lost the fight to create a US Constitutional right out of whole cloth, they are now working to enshrine the right to infanticide in state constitutions. There are nine other states with pro-abort constitutional amendments on the ballot in November: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota. A pro-abort amendment was added to the Ohio constitution in 2023.
