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Arkansas Supreme Court Denies Bid to Get Abortion Measure on the Ballot [1]

['Emily Cochrane']

Date: 2024-08-22

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that an abortion-rights amendment was ineligible for the November ballot, agreeing with state officials that organizers of the effort had failed to submit all of the required paperwork.

The measure appeared all but set to proceed last month when organizers announced they had submitted more than 101,000 signatures in favor of it, well above the minimum 90,704 signatures required to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

But John Thurston, the secretary of state, rejected the petition outright, saying that organizers had failed to correctly submit a sworn statement confirming that paid canvassers had been instructed on how to collect signatures.

The organization behind the measure, Arkansans for Limited Government, sued to revive the petition and force state officials to count the signatures. While the court required a count of the signatures collected by unpaid volunteers, that total — 87,675 — came in short, Mr. Thurston’s office said.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/us/politics/arkansas-abortion-amendment.html

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