Killing Democracy to Enforce Theocracy
By 
The Arkansas effort to get abortion rights on the ballot is probably dead due to the Arkansas Secretary of State finding a vague technicality to throw out the whole effort.
Hell hath no fury like that of women scorned on a technicality.
But that’s the situation facing pro-choice campaigners in Arkansas after Secretary of State John Thurston rejected petitions on Wednesday for an abortion constitutional amendment that appeared headed for the November ballot.
In his letter to Arkansans for Limited Government, the group behind the amendment, Thurston indicated that the group had failed to file key documents—specifically, “a statement identifying the paid canvassers by name, and a signed statement indicating that the sponsor has provided a copy of the most recent edition of the Secretary of State’s initiatives and referenda handbook and explained the requirements under Arkansas law for obtaining signatures on the petition to each paid canvasser before the paid canvasser solicited signatures.”
He added that these requirements had been ruled constitutional a decade ago. He then delivered the brutal kicker: “By contrast, other sponsors of initiative petitions complied with this requirement. Therefore, I must reject your submission.”
Those requirements appear designed to do just what they did in this instance: trip up campaigns that lack the sophistication or the staff to check and cross-check that every bureaucratic obstacle (OK, requirement) had been met.
There was more. Even after disallowing the signatures gathered by the paid canvassers, the secretary indicated that the number of verified signatures collected from registered voters fell several thousand short of the 90,704 mark required to advance to the ballot.
It was a stunning development for a campaign that nearly a week ago was already looking ahead to the fall contest. Getting the required signatures in this reddest of states was no mean feat. Crews of mostly volunteer, state-resident campaigners crisscrossed a very rural and evangelical state and collected 101,525 signatures.
Despite the verbal threats and doxxing that some of these activists had endured from abortion opponents, canvassers had obtained almost 11,000 more signatures than state law required in 53 counties. Until recently, ballot campaigns only had to collect signatures in 15 counties; state lawmakers implemented more stringent requirements to pass constitutional amendments last year.
While you can argue that the people involved should have known what they are doing, these are just everyday people by and large, trying to ensure healthcare for women, which Republicans hate. Moreover, what is crystal clear is that the theocrats who run these states are going to keep finding ways to make it harder and harder for voters to have a say on anything at all. It’s Orban in Little Rock.