The high court ruling upholds a lower court ruling issued hours earlier in which Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish rejected thousands of signatures and said the initiative fell 1,458 signatures short of the 238,000 required to qualify for the ballot. . The judge’s ruling Friday reversed his own ruling from a day earlier, after the Supreme Court asked him to explain how he concluded the initiative had enough valid signatures to qualify. The Supreme Court ruling is the latest in a week-long battle between supporters and opponents of the initiative. Critics, led by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, managed to pull down enough signatures for the measure to fail. Lawyers supporting the initiative urged the Supreme Court to allow the measure to go to voters, saying Mikitis broke the law by letting challengers turn in more signatures than allowed. “In recusing itself today, the trial court has done something unprecedented in Arizona initiative practice and which is not permitted by law,” they wrote. “It allowed challengers to the initiative to strike individual signatures under (the law), for whatever reason, AND allowed them to benefit from the disability rate calculated from the random sample of County Recorders that the challengers did NOT include in this lawsuit.” But Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, in a brief order, simply upheld the revised ruling and kept the initiative off the ballot. When the judge upheld the measure the day before, Brutinel refused to accept it, saying the court was unable to determine exactly how Mikitis arrived at his decision that supporters had collected enough valid signatures for the measure to appear on the ballot. of November. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club said in a statement that the high court’s decision “vindicates what we’ve known all along: the radical Free and Fair Elections initiative did not have enough legal signatures to qualify for the ballot. “The other side knew it, and that’s why their lawyers tried to get the court to adopt a rigged methodology to calculate the final number of valid signatures that would sneak the voided measure onto the ballot.” Supporters of the initiative characterized the legal challenge as a continuation of Republican-led efforts to destroy Arizona’s initiative process. The state constitution says the people have the right to make their own laws, but the Legislature and business groups have pushed for changes that make it easier to get initiatives off the ballot. Voters will see the GOP’s efforts in this direction in November. Several laws that make it difficult to pass or change initiatives were referred to the ballot to weigh voters. “Some politicians have been deliberately trying to attack the voting process for over a decade to prevent voters from being able to make decisions about Arizona’s future at the polls,” the initiative committee said in a statement. “Today’s decision is a continuation of these attacks and reflects an increasingly extreme MAGA agenda.” The high court had already ruled on appeals to two other initiatives, keeping them on the November ballot. Judges said Wednesday that business groups challenging a proposal that calls for greater transparency about political spending and boosting the amount of assets shielded from creditors failed to destroy enough signatures. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and GOP leaders of the House and Senate had urged the high court to throw out all three measures. Ducey has appointed five of the seven judges. Mikitish presided over three weeks of hearings in a case filed by a pro-business group that challenged many of the nearly 400,000 signatures submitted by supporters of the initiative. After attorneys for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club managed to knock down nearly 96,000 signatures and a county review to see if the signatures were valid started with nearly 64,000 more, he was just 2,281 short of the required 237,645 signatures needed to make the ballot. . On Friday, Mikitish changed those numbers. The Free and Fair Elections measure sought to change a number of election laws. It would specifically prevent the Legislature from overturning the results of a presidential election, an avenue some Republicans explored after former President Donald Trump lost the state in 2020. It also would have guaranteed ballot secrecy and barred delivery of election materials or ballots to outside groups such as the state Senate after 2020, expanded voting access, mandated that all voters can go to any polling place, expanded early voting and limited ability of lobbyists to wine and dine lawmakers. The measure would also eliminate the “strict compliance” legal standard that led Mikitish to cancel many of the report cards. The GOP-controlled Legislature required that standard for initiatives in 2017, making it easier to reject them for relatively minor paperwork errors. The Free Enterprise Club disputed tens of thousands of signatures, many on extremely minor issues. For example, 7,000 signatures were disputed because a volunteer report circulator accidentally checked a box indicating they were a paid circulator.
