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Arkansas Supreme Court stretches law to disqualify abortion petition (UPDATES) [1]
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Date: 2024-08-22
Supporters of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment gathered at the Capitol on July 5. The Supreme Court today sided with state officials who disqualified the measure. Credit: Brian Chilson
*This post has been significantly updated through this evening with additional information and further analysis.*
The Arkansas Supreme Court today likely drove a final stake through the heart of a ballot initiative to restore abortion rights in Arkansas. In a 4-3 decision, the court denied the request from the group backing the measure to restart the review process after the secretary of state preemptively disqualified the group last month due to a piece of paperwork the group failed to include in its final submission of the petition.
Despite collecting signatures from more than 100,000 Arkansans — and despite the fact that the plain language of the statutes appeared to show that the review process for the petition should have continued — the court ruled that paperwork omission was fatal to the group’s effort.
For those following the case, this has always been the fear: Even if the law was on their side, the majority of the court opposes abortion. Ultimately the law is what the Supreme Court says it is. Among the grab-bag of flimsy arguments offered by Attorney General Tim Griffin, they found a couple they could stretch to suit the purpose of disqualifying the abortion petition.
In a blistering dissent, Associate Justice Karen Baker took the majority to task for their descent into Calvinball:
Even a cursory review of how the present ballot initiative has progressed since its inception demonstrates that both the respondent and the majority have treated it differently for the sole purpose of preventing the people from voting on this issue.
“Today is a dark day in Arkansas,” said Rebecca Bobrow, a spokesperson for Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), the group leading the petition effort. “This morning, by a vote of 4-3, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Secretary Thurston’s disqualification of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment. More than 102,000 Arkansas voters exercised their constitutionally protected right to engage in direct democracy by signing the petition to get the Arkansas Abortion Amendment on the ballot. The Court’s majority ratifies Secretary Thurston’s decision to silence those voices.”
Theoretically, AFLG could file a lawsuit in federal court. But for procedural and timing reasons, that is extremely unlikely to help. In all likelihood, it’s over: Citizens will not have the opportunity to vote to restore abortion rights in November.
Here is the majority opinion, penned by Associate Justice Rhonda Wood (Wood and Baker are facing off in a race for Chief Justice this November). Wood was joined by Associate Justices Barbara Webb, Shawn Womack and Cody Hiland.
There were two dissents. Here is the first, written by Chief Justice Dan Kemp:
And here is Baker’s dissent, joined by Associate Justice Courtney Hudson:
Background
Here’s how we got here. On July 5, the deadline day for submitting petitions, AFLG failed to turn in a customary piece of compliance paperwork. AFLG had hoped to put its proposal before voters in November, but despite turning in more than 100,000 signatures — well above the necessary threshold — Secretary of State John Thurston disqualified the entire petition on July 10 with no possibility to correct the alleged error in order to make the ballot.
However, as more documents came to light — and as various attorneys with expertise in popular ballot initiative law began researching the statutes more closely — it started to look like Thurston’s decision to stop the count of signatures before it started was a reach at best under the law. Rather than admit error, Thurston doubled down (we can only speculate who was behind this decision, but it seems likely that Attorney General Tim Griffin was involved). He came up with new excuses to justify his action that had been unmentioned in his initial disqualification letter to the petitioners, with a similarly tenuous relationship to the plain language in the statutes. AFLG accused state officials of abusing their power and filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state on July 16.
The case hinged on special requirements under the law that apply to paid canvassers, which Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), the group backing the abortion effort, employed to collect signatures in addition to volunteers. AFLG submitted 102,730 signatures, of which roughly 14,000 were from paid canvassers. The dispute was over those paid signatures — whether some or all of them should count, and if not, when in the process they should be tossed out.
In its majority decision today, the court denied or ignored some of Griffin’s arguments, but okayed his claim that the group’s failure to turn in a particular statement upon its submission on the deadline day meant that all paid signatures should be rejected in the secretary of state’s initial review phase, thereby disqualifying the entire petition.
The dispute
Among the many confusing aspects of the abortion case is that it wound up potentially involving two different required compliance statements that petition groups have to turn in if they use paid canvassers in addition to volunteers. As we covered in our last look at the case: One is a signed statement from the sponsor confirming that all paid canvassers received the training and handbook (we’ll call this the Training Statement); in the other, the sponsor certifies that none of the paid canvassers have a disqualifying conviction after conducting a criminal background check (we’ll call this the Background Statement).
As a matter of custom, simplicity and compliance rigor, groups typically include both statements on one affidavit. All of these groups know that opponents will seek out any error to try and stop them — so, in an abundance of caution, groups try to include every possible requirement when they submit paperwork.
That’s what the abortion group did every time it registered new hires, all the way through June 27. But it failed to include that document in its final submission at the deadline on July 5.
This was an unforced error by the petitioners: The secretary of state’s handbook on petitions clearly lists the final affidavit as one of the paperwork requirements for submitting a petition, along with the necessary signatures. The group claims that it had been wrongly told by the secretary of state’s office that this was not required, but there is no way to prove that allegation; Griffin called it “hardly plausible.” Unlike the abortion group, the other groups turned in the paperwork on July 5. This oversight has now proved to be fatal, giving the Supreme Court the ammo it needed to creatively interpret the relevant statutes.
Be that as it may, it is worth reiterating once again — as three justices did today in their dissents — that the actual statutory language appears to show that the paperwork oversight should not be fatal to the group’s effort. And the handbook cannot overrule the law.
The secretary of state’s review process is a multi-step process. Certain violations are culled in an initial review, whereas other violations are culled in the final count. That matters because to survive to the final phase, a petition has to stay above the signature threshold — 90,704 — during the initial review, when certain specific “facial” violations are culled. In the final count, other violations that aren’t facial are culled. If 75% of that 90,704 total are left (that would be 68,028) the petitioners earn a chance to “cure” — a 30-day period allowing petition groups to make up for a shortfall after faulty signatures have been culled in the secretary of state’s review process. The cure period is typically crucial because inevitably, some signatures will have issues that cause them to be tossed out.
The attorney general argued that the failure to turn in the final updated Training Statement on July 5 meant that all signatures collected by paid canvassers preemptively disqualified the entire petition — or at least those signatures, which would knock the effort back down below the 90,704 threshold.
The abortion petitioners countered that at the very least, all the paid canvassers listed on the June 27 Training Statement were perfectly valid. Even if they weren’t, they argued, they should not be culled until the final phase of the count, meaning that the group would remain above 90,704 to survive the first phase. If the paid signatures were not tossed until the end, the group could make them up via the cure period so long as they stayed above the 75% threshold.
The ruling
While there are other arguments and issues in the briefs that have been filed from both parties, the case largely came down to three questions:
Is failure to turn in a fully updated Training Statement on July 5 a “facial” error requiring preemptive disqualification (or even existential in a way that would demand disqualification prior to the facial review even occurring)? If not, does the Training Statement turned in on June 27 sufficiently cover at least the paid canvassers hired through that date? Does the requirement for a “sponsor” to sign paperwork mean that a Background or Training statement signed by the paid canvassing company is invalid? The court was silent on this question. See below for more.
On the first question, the majority rejected Griffin’s original argument that the violation was existential and should facially (or pre-facially, if you like) disqualify the entire submission prior to any form of counting even beginning. But it found that the omission of the Training Statement in the group’s July 5 submission does count as a facial error, despite the violation in question not being included in the law’s list of designated violations that qualify as facial.
Again, this is crucial, because culling the signatures at the first review stage means that the remainder — the signatures collected by the volunteers totaled, at most, 88,587 — are a couple thousand short of the 90,704 threshold. Thus, the violation in this case is fatal, the majority said.
Ironically, Griffin may well have conjured the initial goofball argument he raised in briefs to try to explain Thurston’s actions precisely because he realized that the main original justification from state officials was did not actually comply with what the statutes say. But it was that original justification that the majority found most palatable today!
In retrospect, Griffin should have had faith in partisan allies on the court to buy Thurston’s initial flimsy excuse, but after realizing that the original allegation seemed not to be facial according to a plain reading of the statutes, Griffin shifted emphasis and claimed in early filings that Thurston had not nixed the paid signatures as a facial violation but rather determined that the entire submission “failed for want of initiation.” This just seemed to be throwing stuff at the wall to see what might stick.
Here’s how it all went down: In Thurston’s first letter, he put a good deal of emphasis on a claim that it was a facial violation on the paid signatures that was fatal to the group’s effort because it dropped them below the 90,704 threshold. But in a followup letter, after AFLG and others noted that the statutes in question appeared to say that Thurston’s allegation — whether it was true or not — was not facial, the secretary of state’s office came up with new arguments and starkly shifted its emphasis. Presumably this was at Griffin’s urging. Thereafter, Griffin claimed that actually Thurston disqualified the entire petition as a whole immediately, including the volunteer signatures — in the same manner he would have done if petitioners had not turned in any signatures at all. According to this twist, Griffin claimed that Thurston had no obligation to count a single signature, but had simply done so as a courtesy to the abortion petitioners.
This novel excuse was even sillier as a matter of law than the original focus on the violation being facial. The court unanimously rejected it from the very beginning when it denied Griffin’s motion for a dismissal. It was unanimously rejected once again today: “On a facial validity count, the Secretary cannot point to any statutory or constitutional provision requiring that no signatures be counted for this failure,” Wood wrote. “The Secretary does not provide a compelling argument that failing to comply with respect to paid canvassers requires rejection of signatures gathered by volunteer canvassers. We do not find constitutional or statutory support for that argument.”
As was widely speculated at the time, this was the reason that the court last month mandated that the secretary continue with an initial count to determine how many signatures were collected by volunteers, which were not impacted by the violation the court affirmed today regarding the paid canvassers.
However, once that count revealed that without the paid signatures, the group was short of the 90,704 threshold in the first phase of review, that disqualified the petition, Wood argued today. In order to boot the abortion petition off the ballot, she instead fell back on Thurston’s original claim that he was removing signatures because the omission of a Training Statement is a facial violation.
There are two inconvenient facts Wood has to work around in order to reach this conclusion that the Training Statement is facial: 1) Two other statutes very clearly lay out the “do not count” violations that should be culled early as facial (all of them self-evidently more serious than the violation in question here) and do not include the Training Statement; 2) The statute with the Training Statement requirement does not have “do not count” language and instead explains the cure process for collecting new signatures to make up a shortfall in the case of violations being culled.
Wood, echoing Griffin, says that the word “shall” in the Training Statement requirement means that it must be facial. She ignores the way that renders other statutory language gratuitous or contradictory, as well as the fact that other listed statutes in the “do not count” list likewise include the word “shall,” suggesting that the word alone does not settle the matter.
Most tellingly, she simply repeats the error that Thurston made originally. In his first letter, Thurston stated that the signatures collected by paid canvassers “could not be counted for any reason” (in other words, the violation was facial). This mimics the language in the “do not count” lists in two key statutes. The problem for Thurston: The statute he was citing does not have the “do not count” language. He was moving language from one statute to another.
Wood does precisely the same thing. She acknowledges a previous finding in a 2016 case that the statute in question (§ 7-9-111(f)(2)) was not attached to a “do not count” provision. But she points to a later change to the law in 2019 that added “do not count” language to a different statute (§7-9-601). And when the court had to review a case involving a violation under 601 — now with its “do not count” language — that violation was indeed found to be facial in 2020.
Wood is engaging in a pure sleight of hand. The violation in the 2020 case, and the “do not count” language she refers to, fall under §7-9-601. They have absolutely nothing to do with § 7-9-111, which has never had “do not count language.” No one disputes that a 601 violation would be facial. But this is not a 601 violation! It’s a 111 violation. That is the whole crux of the language. One has “do not count” language, and the other does not.
To see just how stark this sleight of hand is, take a look at what Wood does, and does not, mention:
The statute now provides that “[s]ignatures incorrectly obtained or submitted under this section shall not be counted by the Secretary of State for any purpose.” … This leaves us with no doubt as to the intent of the General Assembly to exclude for any purpose the signatures obtained or submitted by paid canvassers that do not meet statutory requirements.
Look at that bit of statute she quotes again: “under this section.” But. The Training Statement violation is not under the 601 section. It is in 111. Here we see motivated reasoning at work: The very language Wood quotes disproves the point she is trying to make.
The court’s finding that the Training Statement violation is facial is the toughest to swallow under the law. They have at least more reasonable ground to stand on for their answer to the second question: Did AFLG fail to satisfy the requirement for at least some of the paid canvassers via its June 27 submission.
The Training Statement says nothing about timing, unlike other requirements that are specific about turning something precisely upon submission. There is no obvious prohibition on turning in material early. Nevertheless, Wood says that the Statement must be turned in precisely at the same time as the petition submission as a whole. She likewise argues that because the statement is required to cover “each paid canvasser,” the early submission was deficient because some canvassers were hired afterwards.
She was apparently not open to the possibility of disqualifying those canvassers hired after June 27, without disqualifying those who were covered on the June 27 list — despite the fact that the secretary of state in reviewing other petitions disqualifies signatures from paid canvassers not included on the Training Statement without disqualifying all paid canvasser signatures (indeed, there is a tab designated for this very purpose for staffers conducting the review process). Again, such nuances were inconvenient, and ignored.
From Wood’s opinion:
It is one single statement at one specific point in time. Also, the statement must cover “each paid canvasser,” not some of the paid canvassers. It is undisputed, even by the dissenting justices, that there was not a paid canvasser certification filed for “each paid canvasser.”
Because the remaining signatures after the paid signatures are culled “fails to meet the facial validity threshold required by law,” Wood writes, “we deny further relief.”
Given the fact that she is in the middle of a campaign, did politics play a part in Wood’s decision? Was the court motivated to find a way to get abortion off the ballot?
Protesting perhaps too much, Wood adds in a footnote: “Dissenting justices give credence to Petitioners’ arguments that different amendments were treated differently. This court addresses each case as it comes.”
It will be interesting to see whether the 100,000 Arkansans who exercised a constitutional right to sign the abortion petition will see things differently.
The dissents
Baker’s dissent savages Wood’s obfuscations:
“Regnat Populus—The People Rule—is the motto of Arkansas. It should ever remain inviolate.” Our constitution embodies this foundational principle, as its text
makes all too clear that “[t]he first power reserved by the people is the initiative.” Today’s decision strips every Arkansan of this power.
“[T]he majority has reconfigured the relevant statute in order to cater the initiative
process to the preference of the respondent while this process is the first power reserved for the people,” Baker writes. “In fact, despite the majority’s acknowledgment that ‘[t]his court cannot rewrite the statute[,]” the majority has done just that multiple times to achieve a particular result.”
Rather than Wood’s strategy of bending the statutory language to try to retrofit state officials’ justifications for their actions, Baker adheres closely to what the law actually says:
“there is no contemporaneous filing requirement associated with the submission of the certification…nothing in the statute requires that the certification and the petition be filed simultaneously. On the contrary, this requirement was made up out of whole cloth by the respondent and inexplicably ratified by the majority of this court. However, the rules of statutory construction do not permit us to read into a statute words that are not there.”
“It is absurd to hold that a certification cannot be submitted early, and by concluding otherwise, the majority has added yet another obstacle that prevents Arkansans from exercising their constitutional rights.”
“my analysis affords ‘full credit’ to the 191 paid canvassers included on the June 27 cumulative list and certification because this was a complete list covering each paid canvasser that had been hired by that date. Stated differently, the June 27 submission was not a “partial attempt” to comply by the petitioners; rather, it was full compliance as to the 191 paid canvassers. Contrary to the majority’s tortured statutory analysis, while there were paid canvassers hired after June 27, nothing in the statute justifies the exclusion of the signatures collected by the paid canvassers included with the June 27 certification.”
Unlike the majority, which simply glosses over the blatant discriminatory practices state officials engaged in between the abortion group, the marijuana group and the casino group, Bakers takes that issue head-on:
I would be remiss if I neglected to highlight these allegations, as the differing treatment of these petitions is alarming. As set forth above, the initiative is the first power reserved for the people by the Arkansas Constitution. Why are the respondent and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people? 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.
Ouch.
We can speculate that Baker might have likewise rejected the majority’s finding that the a problem with the Training Statement is a facial violation, but she does not cover that issue because she argues that there is no violation at all for signatures collected by the paid canvassers covered by the June 27 list.
Kemp, in his dissent, focuses more on the curious decision by the majority to rule that the Training Statement issue was facial.
“This case presents an anomaly in Arkansas jurisprudence,” Kemp writes. “Stopping midstream during the initial count-of-signatures process, the Secretary of State rejected petitioners’ proposed abortion-amendment petition.” This was not in accordance with the law, Kemp concludes.
Thurston “has not fulfilled [his] statutory obligation,” Kemp writes. “Therefore, I would order the Secretary to complete a statutorily mandated initial count of signatures, including those signatures obtained by the paid canvassers.”
Kemp would also appoint a special master to make findings of fact (Baker likewise said she would appoint a special master), including regarding the petitioners’ allegation that they were mislead by the secretary of state’s office. The special master should examine at least the following, Kemp said:
(1) any discrepancies between the parties with respect to the petitioners’ filings; (2) the petitioners’ communications to the Secretary during the initial-count process—including statements and emails regarding paid canvassers; (3) the Secretary’s communications to the petitioners during the initial-count process—including statements and emails regarding paid canvassers; (4) any statements made by the Secretary’s office to the petitioners regarding the initial signature-count requirements; (5) Allison Clark’s status with AFLG and her authority to sign the sponsor statement; (6) petitioners’ attempt to correct any alleged noncompliance with section 7-9-111(f)(2); (7) the Secretary’s actions relating to petitioners’ attempt to correct the alleged noncompliance; and (8) the Secretary’s actions regarding the initial signature counts for AFLG as opposed to other ballot initiatives. These findings are crucial to this court’s analysis in making its conclusions of law.
Here’s that third issue in the case we mentioned above. The majority ignored it because they tossed the abortion petition on other grounds (Baker said this was a mistake given the issues it raised in this case), so it wound up not making a difference to the order today. But it remains a live issue for the two other petition groups still aiming to get measures on the ballot this November.
Here’s what happened: Confusing matters even more, one of the excuses Thurston and Griffin tossed into the pile was that both the group’s Background and Training statements were signed by the wrong person.
Rather than being signed by the leader of AFLG itself, it was signed by the company the group contracted with to organize the paid canvassing effort. This was a novel claim that went against the practice that had been followed for other groups, both this year and in past cycles, and also ran completely counter to standard agency law. Attorney David Couch, who has been deeply involved in the wave of ballot initiative efforts in the state over the last 12 years, told the Arkansas Times: “This is something that the secretary of state and the attorney general made up.”
It also wound up implicating two other groups backing ballot initiatives — one pushing for an expansion of the state’s medical marijuana program and another that opposes the casino license awarded to Cherokee Nation Entertainment in Pope County earlier this year. These groups had likewise used their own paid canvassing contractors to sign their Background Statements.
Based on the plain language in the statute and the manner in which the legislature implemented these provisions for the purpose of preventing fraud — as well as simple common sense — the Background Statement is more serious than the Training Statement. It must be turned in as part of registration each time a new paid canvasser is hired. Not a single signature by a new hire can be collected until that happens. Any signatures they do collect without it are indisputably “facial” errors — they are automatically invalid and must be culled at the beginning phase of the review process, meaning they don’t count in the final review, when petitioners are hoping to reach the 75% threshold to earn a cure period.
That would be fatal to both the marijuana and the casino petitions, so both groups intervened in the abortion case. As their brief pointed out, Thurston and Griffin bizarrely applied this new rule about what counts as a sponsor in three different ways to the three different groups: On these grounds alone, none of the signatures from paid canvassers by the abortion group were allowed; some of them by the marijuana group were allowed; and all of them by the casino group were allowed. Neither the secretary of state nor the attorney general “has provided an explanation for their inconsistent interpretations and actions between the three initiative petition sponsors,” the brief states. “Nor can they; it does not exist.”
The court’s majority opinion tries dodge this ugly appearance of discriminatory treatment and naked unfairness by avoiding the “sponsor” issue altogether, finding instead that AFLG committed a facial violation on other grounds. Baker chides the majority for passing on this question: “The majority deliberately bypassed the issue concerning who has the authority to sign the certification even in light of the allegations of disparate treatment that have been made regarding the respondent’s treatment of three initiative petitions.”
Griffin’s argument on this front is bogus, Baker concludes: “The respondent makes no convincing argument…and as the intervenors note, the legal effect of the respondent’s position would turn basic agency law on its head.”
In a bizarre attempt to get ahead of the story on the “sponsor” issue, Griffin released a laughably bad YouTube video to the public last Friday, after the deadline for filings with the court had closed. Griffin’s arguments there try to justify his fictitious rule and the strange way it was applied. Hilariously, his video didn’t cover any of the issues that the court’s majority actually leaned on to find a way to rule against the abortion petitioners. Instead, he harped on claims that proved irrelevant in this case, and may ultimately prove too embarrassing for the court to accept for other petitions
The tedious and bumbling PowerPoint presentation, which seemed like something out of “The Office,” was a willfully misleading and incompetently effort to bamboozle the public on this issue. If the court ultimately rejects Griffin’s humiliatingly manufactured claims on that question, it will come either via an ongoing lawsuit involving the casino case or a new lawsuit by the marijuana group.
Reactions
Here’s the full statement from AFLG:
Today is a dark day in Arkansas. This morning, by a vote of 4-3, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Secretary Thurston’s disqualification of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment. More than 102,000 Arkansas voters exercised their constitutionally protected right to engage in direct democracy by signing the petition to get the Arkansas Abortion Amendment on the ballot. The Court’s majority ratifies Secretary Thurston’s decision to silence those voices. AFLG agrees with the sentiments expressed in the dissenting opinions. As Justice Baker’s dissent explains, the majority opinion supports Secretary Thurston’s decision to make up “out of whole cloth” statutory requirements that do not exist. Justice Baker’s dissent also highlights the alarming nature of Secretary Thurston’s treatment of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment: “…the differing treatment of these petitions is alarming. As set forth above, the initiative is the first power reserved for the people by the Arkansas Constitution. Why are the respondent and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people? 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.” According to Justice Baker, Secretary Thurston and the majority of the Court have treated the Arkansas Abortion Amendment “differently for the sole purpose of preventing the people from voting on this issue.” Democracy demands better. Despite this infuriating result, our fight isn’t over. We can’t — and won’t — rest until Arkansas women have access to safe, standard health care and the autonomy to make decisions about their bodies free from governmental interference. To Arkansans: We hope that you will stick with us in this fight. We are certainly sticking with you. We extend the deepest, most heartfelt gratitude to the more than 800 volunteers and 30 volunteer leaders who worked tirelessly to educate voters, coordinate signing opportunities, and collect signatures throughout the entire state. The volunteers completed a herculean task that many assumed would be impossible. They were fearless in the face of misinformation, intimidation, and harassment. And their work will leave an indelible mark on Arkansas politics. This effort has generated a wave of fiercely engaged Arkansas women. We are outraged. We will not back down. And we will remember this in November.
And here is Griffin’s bad-faith boasting: Big win for the rule of law as the Arkansas Supreme Court confirmed today that the abortion advocates failed to follow the law that other ballot committees had successfully followed for over a decade since Governor Mike Beebe signed the law governing paid canvassers in 2013.
The… pic.twitter.com/VzHGzERn2l — Attorney General Tim Griffin (@AGTimGriffin) August 22, 2024
And Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks to take credit as well, perhaps revealing too much about how this really works: 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. — Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) August 22, 2024
Hard to take seriously a claim that the court “upheld the rule of law” — as the dissents convincingly argue, the majority did the opposite. But she’s right that her appointment of a loyal toady to the court was key. That helped to assure that Griffin and his ever-changing, bad-faith arguments could prevail, thanks to a majority hell-bent to bend the law by any means necessary to get abortion off the ballot for purely political reasons. That’s not the rule of law. That’s the Rule of Sarah.
Sanders likes to brag that Arkansas is a strongly anti-abortion state. But if that’s so, it’s hard not to wonder why state officials have gone to such ham-fisted attempts to keep it from ever getting to a vote of the people. Might they might be worried what the people might say? And another question: Should they now be worried about the backlash after every branch of government in Arkansas has worked so hard to keep the people from having a say?
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