Arizona school choice reform effort fails before reaching ballots

The discounted duplicate petition signatures confirmed by the Arizona Supreme Court will place the effort to limit Arizona’s school choice program below the legal signature threshold.PHOENIX (CN) — Arizona voters likely won’t have the chance to rein in the state’s controversial school choice voucher program after the state Supreme Court found no issue with disqualifying duplicate petition signatures.The Supreme Court’s Tuesday morning ruling affirms a trial court’s method for removing duplicates and means 24,000 signatures will most likely be removed, possibly putting the measure under the legal threshold to get on the ballot.Though the Protect Education Act received nearly twice the minimum number of signatures to appear on the ballot, a lawsuit filed in July by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and Goldwater Institute resulted in the disqualification of tens of thousands of signatures over invalid addresses and other eligibility concerns.After removing facially invalid signatures from the initial 420,000, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes sent random samples of the 389,000 remaining signatures to county recorders for verification, in accordance with state statute. From there, officials calculated a 75.2% validity rate and projected that onto the total, bringing the number closer to 292,000.Additionally, Maricopa County Judge David McDowell tossed signatures collected by more than a dozen petition circulators; some were ineligible to collect signatures for felony backgrounds and others who made mistakes on their registration forms.“Despite spending an unprecedented amount of money in an effort to deceive voters into restricting school choice, the unions could not convince even a small fraction of Arizonans to sign their petition,” Goldwater CEO Victor Riches said in a press release. “Instead, they had to resort to unlawfully collecting thousands of signatures to try to game the system and dupe their way onto the ballot.”Protect Education Accountability Now, the political action committee backing the ballot measure, asked the Supreme Court to overturn McDowell’s decision on duplicate signatures.State law requires that all but one signature in a duplicative set be removed. In the order, Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer said McDowell’s decision follows the law correctly.Because the state is dealing with a sample rather than the entire raw data set, the committee argued the approach could double count duplicates.It said in its briefs that applying the validity rate to the sample should already account for all invalid signatures, including duplicates, meaning removing the total number of duplicates from that sample would essentially subtract them twice.The high court was unconvinced.“Removing all but one signature of a duplicate set does not fail to retain one — it retains exactly one, which is all § 19-121.02(A)(8) requires,” Timmer wrote. “The committee identifies no specific signatures subtracted twice; its objection is that double-counting is theoretically possible, not that it demonstrably occurred.”The high court didn’t strike the signatures, but remanded the case back to McDowell for the final decision. McDowell has until Thursday, when the state will print its general election ballots, to decide.“Tens of thousands of parents and students across Arizona are breathing a sigh of relief today,” former Arizona Governor and current Goldwater Institute board member Doug Ducey said in the press release. “Today’s ruling should send a clear message to any other anti-parent, anti-school-choice organization: Arizonans overwhelmingly embrace school choice and will continue to do so, regardless of how many millions of dollars these groups waste trying to take it away.”If approved, the Protect Education Act, formally known as Proposition 212, would have sought to curb fraud and abuse of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program that gives public school funding directly to families to use on private, charter or homeschool education. Initially intended for low-income families and students with disabilities, the state expanded the program to all students in 2022.Since then, the state has uncovered millions of dollars in fraudulent spending, including luxury purchases like diamond rings and home appliances, and bad actors collecting money for nonexistent children. Republicans have consistently resisted adding any guardrails to the program, which has cost the state more than $1 billion annually, championing individual liberty over funding public education.“This is a system that has few to no protections for our school systems and our children,” Democratic state Senator Priya Sundareshan said in a Legislative Council meeting Tuesday morning. “Teachers are leaving the profession. Public schools are closing. And we’re giving these dollars to families that were already paying for private school.”The measure would have limited eligibility to families who make less than $150,000 per year, and would have prohibited the use of voucher dollars for “luxury purchases” like out-of-state travel, dining, amusement park tickets, home appliances and home improvement projects.The council met to revise the official ballot summary after the Supreme Court found the Republicans’ version to be “argumentative.”In a Friday ruling, Timmer wrote that the council “cherry picked” one potential outcome of just one provision of the measure, failing to give voters an honest and neutral summary of the entire measure.Now, that summary likely no longer matters.Protect Education Accountability Now did not respond to a request for comment.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads