PHOENIX—A campaign to put an initiative on affirmative action on Arizona’s Nov. 4 ballot is over.
The Arizona Civil Rights Initiative campaign led by former California educator Ward Connerly announced Friday it was abandoning its lawsuit to overturn the state’s decertification of Proposition 104.
The campaign issued a statement saying it still believed it collected enough valid petition signatures to put the initiative on the ballot but said it couldn’t review all the signatures rejected by election officials in time.
The effort to amend the Arizona Constitution will be made anew for the 2010 ballot, the campaign said. “Arizona voters will have a chance to vote on this important issue.”
The proposed amendment to the Arizona Constitution was intended to dismantle state and local government preferential programs for women and minorities.
A similar measure also backed by former Connerly is on Nebraska’s ballot and one is pending in Colorado.
A judge late Thursday gave the Arizona initiative campaign until next Wednesday to finish its review of approximately 6,000 signatures rejected by Maricopa County. The campaign said that wasn’t enough time because the county was letting it use only two voter-registration computers to check the signatures.
Though county elections officials were helpful, “no matter how helpful they have been, the fact remains that our campaign and those who signed our petitions have been cheated,” the campaign said.
County Elections Director Karen Osborne testified during a Thursday evening court hearing that workers preparing to conduct Tuesday’s primary election needed to use the county’s other voter-registration computers.
An opponent of the Arizona initiative scoffed at the campaign’s explanation for pulling the plug, saying that it failed to prepare for its lawsuit by checking the random samples of signatures while elections officials reviewed them during late July and early August.
The opponents did that to prepare for their own lawsuit challenging Proposition 104, said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix.
Supporters of Proposition 104 on July 3 submitted 334,735 petition signatures on July 3, the deadline to file initiative petitions for this year’s ballot.
In decertifying the measure on Aug. 21, Secretary of State Jan Brewer said reviews by state and county officials indicated that only 194,961 were valid, short of the needed 230,047.
Even while the campaign’s lawsuit was pending before Judge Edward Burke of Maricopa County Superior Court, some ballot pages and other election materials without listing Proposition 104 were already going to printers.
Election officials warned that the start of early general election voting on Oct. 2 and timely mailing of ballots to troops overseas and other Arizonans would be at stake if they didn’t abide by their printing deadlines.
The Arizona campaign’s executive director, Max McPhail, testified Thursday evening that partial checks of thousands of signatures deemed invalid by Maricopa County officials found that many were actually valid.
A county election official then testified that most of those same signatures were rejected for legitimate reasons, including signatures that didn’t vote those on the voters’ registration cards.
Burke gave initiative supporters the time they’re allowed under state law to challenge the decertification of their proposal, until Wednesday.
“I really want to give the plaintiff the best shot,” Burke said in court, saying he wasn’t persuaded by government officials’ arguments that the campaign waited too long to file its suit.
