Arkansans will vote on a proposal to increase the state's minimum wage after the State Supreme Court rejected a request to remove Issue 5 from the 2014 ballot.
Court justices ruled Monday that early petitions calling for the minimum wage issue to be put on the ballot contained the requisite number of voter signatures.
Ballot issue sponsors must submit a specific number of signatures, regardless if they are valid or not, to qualify for an additional 30 days from the Secretary of State's office to correct problems with petitions. Sponsors typically use that 30-day period to gather more signatures from voters to make up for illegible signatures or badly made copies of petitions that can disqualify dozens of signatures. It's only after those 30 days are up that the Secretary of State's office compares signatures against an official list of registered voters.
Challengers said the Secretary of State's office should have tossed some of the first batch of petition pages because the notary public's signature appeared to be forged. If those specific petitions had been set aside, the lawsuit alleged, sponsors wouldn't have had the requisite number of signatures to qualify for the 30 additional days.
State Supreme Court justices rejected the argument made by Jackson Stephens Jr's attorneys and said the petition pages appeared to meet the Secretary of State's initial requirements.
"The initial count is just that - an initial count of the signatures submitted at the time of filing and prior to any signature verification," the judges' court opinion states.
The court also rejected the lawsuit's challenge over the date on which the petitions were filed, just as they did for Issue 4 earlier this month. Court justices agreed with the Secretary of State that July 7 was a sufficient petition deadline because otherwise signatures would have been due on July 4, a day when state offices are closed.
Only one statewide ballot issue remains in court. But the lawsuit seeking to remove Issue 3, an ethics amendment, has stalled in Pulaski County Circuit Court.
"We are not anticipating anything before the election and have not heard from the plaintiffs since the last court filing. So, it should be on the ballot," said Mark Myers with the Secretary of State's Office on Tuesday.
The Public Policy Center will continue to follow these issues and keep you updated on the 2014 ballot measures.
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