Arkansas Supreme Court upholds rejection of petitions to let voters decide on abortion access

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the state's rejection of signed petitions for an abortion rights ballot initiative on Thursday, keeping the proposal from going before voters in November.

The ruling dashed the organizers' hopes of getting the constitutional amendment measure onto the ballot in the predominantly Republican state, where many top leaders promote their opposition to abortion.

Election officials said Arkansans for Limited Government failed to comply with state law primarily because it submitted documentation regarding paid signature gatherers separately and not in a single bundle. The group argued that it should have been given more time to provide any additional documents needed.

“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” in the way the law requires, Justice Rhonda Wood wrote for the 4-3 majority.

A dissenting justice wrote that the decision strips Arkansans' of their rights and effectively changes the state's initiative law.

“Why are the respondent and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” wrote Justice Karen Baker, who is running against Wood for chief justice. “The majority has succeeded in its efforts to change the law in order to deprive the voters of the opportunity to vote on this issue, which is not the proper role of this court.”

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision removing the nationwide right to abortion, there has been a push to have voters decide the matter state by state. Montana on Tuesday became the eighth state to put an abortion issue before voters this fall.

Abortion supporters have won in all seven states that have put abortion questions before voters since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Arkansans for Limited Government emailed a statement calling the ruling “a dark day in Arkansas.”

“This effort has generated a wave of fiercely engaged Arkansas women,” the group said. “We are outraged. We will not back down. And we will remember this in November.”

Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders took credit on Thursday: “Proud I helped build the first conservative Supreme Court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” she posted on X.

Arkansas currently bans abortion at any time during a pregnancy, unless the woman’s life is endangered due to a medical emergency.

The proposed amendment would have prohibited laws banning abortion in the first 20 weeks of gestation and allowed the procedure later on in cases of rape, incest, threats to the woman’s health or life, or if the fetus would be unlikely to survive birth. It would not have created a constitutional right to abortion.

The ballot proposal lacked support from national abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood because it would still have allowed abortion to be banned after 20 weeks, which is earlier than other states where it remains legal.

Had they all been verified, the more than 101,000 signatures, submitted on the state's July 5 deadline, would have been enough to qualify for the ballot. The threshold was 90,704 signatures from registered voters, and from a minimum of 50 counties.

In a earlier filing with the court, election officials said that 87,675 of the signatures submitted were collected by volunteers with the campaign. Election officials said it could not determine whether 912 of the signatures came from volunteer or paid canvassers. The court's majority said only those signatures gathered by volunteers could be counted, falling short of the threshold.

“This is a win for the rule of law in Arkansas and for those who have followed the rules for years to participate in the state’s ballot initiative process,” Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin, who represented the secretary of state's office, said in a statement.

Arkansans for Limited Government and election officials disagreed over whether the petitions complied with a 2013 state law requiring campaigns to submit identify each paid canvasser by name and confirm that rules for gathering signatures were explained to them.

Supporters of the measure said they followed the law with their documentation, including identifying each paid gatherer. They have also argued the abortion petitions are being handled differently than other initiative campaigns this year, pointing to similar filings by two other groups.

State records show that the abortion campaign did submit, on June 27, a signed affidavit including a list of paid canvassers and a statement saying the petition rules had been explained to them. Then, the July 5 submission included affidavits from each paid worker acknowledging that the group provided them with all the rules and regulations required by law.

The state argued in court that this documentation did not comply because it was signed by someone with the canvassing company rather than someone with the initiative campaign. The court did not rule on that issue.

But the majority on Thursday said the statement also needed to be submitted in one bundle so “the Secretary has all the necessary information together and organized when he begins the process.”

The court said the June 27 filing did not cover 74 of the paid gatherers used by the abortion campaign.

In another dissent, Chief Justice Dan Kemp said the court should have ordered the state to count all of the signatures and appointed a special master to review the disputed facts.

"This case presents an anomaly in Arkansas jurisprudence," he wrote.