Photo by Jim Small | Arizona Mirror
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a ballot proposition to end partisan primaries will be allowed to appear on the November ballot, though the initiative is still facing another legal challenge to its place on the ballot that won’t be settled for several weeks.
If voters approve Proposition 140 in November, they would amend the Arizona Constitution to create an open primary system where all candidates for federal, state and local offices would face off in a single primary election instead of segregated partisan elections. Those primaries would also include candidates who are politically unaffiliated.
The proposal, known as the Make Arizona Elections Fair Act, would allow all registered voters to choose from all the candidates in the primary, and the top vote-getters would advance to the general election, even if they don’t represent different parties.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday rejected lawsuits brought by the state Democratic and Republican parties alleging that the ballot measure unconstitutionally did too many things, violating a requirement that changes to the constitution contain only a single amendment. In doing so, it upheld a lower court’s decision.
“[T]he provisions of the Act are topically related, sufficiently interrelated, involve matters that have historically been treated as one subject and are qualitatively similar in their effect on the law, even if the changes concern more than one section of Article 7 of the Arizona Constitution,” the unanimous ruling said. “As the superior court noted, touching on more than one section of the constitution is not necessarily fatal.”
That clears Prop. 140 for the ballot on constitutional grounds. But earlier on Thursday, the Supreme Court sent a lawsuit challenging the signatures back to the trial court, which had previously ruled the initiative exceeded the minimum number required to appear on the ballot.
At issue now for the trial court will be determining whether some 40,000 signatures that were already deemed valid are in fact duplicates, which would jeopardize the measure’s place on the November ballot.
“We are so grateful to the Arizona Supreme Court for allowing the evidence of 40,000 duplicate signatures to be reviewed by the lower court,” said Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Swoboda. “This petition does not have enough signatures to qualify to appear on our ballot… We are hopeful the lower court will find the measure has not met the required threshold in its review.”
But Chuck Coughlin, a spokesman for the Prop. 140 campaign, said the Supreme Court order merely ordered the trial court to consider the evidence of the duplicate signatures.
“The trial court ruled today and previously that that exhibit did not prove what they claimed it proved. They failed to meet the burden of proof,” he said.
After an emergency hearing today, that case won’t resume until Sept. 3.
That will be after the deadline to print ballots so they can be mailed to overseas voters. And Coughlin said “there is no evidence in front of the Supreme Court today that would permit them to say we did not meet our minimum number of signature requirements,” so Prop. 140 would appear on ballots in November.
Maricopa County has contended that ballots need to be finalized by Aug. 22 in order for ballots to be able to begin being printed in time for the November election. A spokesperson for the county said its ballots will include Prop. 140.
The Arizona Mirror reached out to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office to get clarification but did not get a response by time of publication.
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