Latest COVID-19 death: Your right to make law
It appears supporters of ballot initiatives that sought the court’s help to gather signatures in the time of the coronavirus are out of luck.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday denied an emergency request by the campaigns of four ballot measures to allow voters to sign petitions via the web. An opinion outlining the court’s reasoning is pending.
The decision followed a federal court judge’s decision last month in a separate lawsuit that also rejected the bid for online signatures to qualify citizen initiatives.
Which means the only way for the various measures to get on the Nov. 3 ballot is to prove the courts right — that they don’t need the intervention, after all.
A tall if not impossible order, that. The only initiative with a realistic chance is one that would legalize marijuana, largely because it had a big jumpstart (a reprise of a failed bid in 2016) and a lot of funding for paid petition circulators.
It remains to be seen what formed the basis of the high court’s 6-1 decision.
But as Roopali Desai, the attorney representing the four initiative campaigns, noted, the court gave voters the “untenable choice of securing their constitutional rights or their personal health and safety.”
She’s right.
While the Arizona Constitution requires initiative petitions to be signed in the presence of a circulator, there’s ample evidence that voters’ ability to engage in direct democracy by signing a petition has been severely affected by government-imposed COVID-19 restrictions.
The bans since March on large gatherings, from professional sports to concerts and festivals, eliminated the main way that campaigns connect with the public.
Even with the lifting of the stay-athome order and partial reopening of the economy, in-person access to voters is, and will be for some time to come, extremely limited. Many Arizonans, in essence, remain in lockdown.
Online signatures are a workable and reasonable solution, an argument that didn’t carry the day with the justices (save Vice Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer).
And one that’s already used by candidates to collect signatures to qualify for legislative and statewide and federal offices, via the E-Qual (Electronic Qualification) system.
It is both an irony and an indictment of state lawmakers that those who enjoy the benefits of electronic signatures don’t see fit to grant the same to the Arizona electorate. A plea to pass emergency legislation – the statehouse is the most appropriate venue to grant such relief – was met with silence.
It also should be noted that legal reasoning aside, state Attorney General Mark Brnovich opposed the lawsuit because the initiative campaigns could have begun collecting signatures earlier before the coronavirus crisis developed.
It is a specious point. Campaigns have long favored a spring timeline that allows for coordination and for favorable weather and big events to optimize their efforts.
It is also wrong. Terry Goddard, a former AG who’s spearheading the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative to force transparency on campaign spending, got a head start with his group and by early March had collected 280,000 signatures. But the constitutional amendment needs 356,467 and tens of thousands more to withstand legal challenges.
That effort is in jeopardy.
No one would question COVID-19’s damaging impact on direct democracy. No one would intervene either, apparently.
As it stands, initiative campaigns were robbed of precious time and must now weigh throwing in the towel. Or carrying on, unaided by the courts and the representatives they elected and hobbled by the effects of the novel coronavirus, to collect upwards of 200,000 or more signatures by July 2.
They have good cause to feel defeated.