Arkansas Supreme Court keeps minimum wage issue on the ballot

After several weeks of legal wrangling, a key component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote strategy will remain on the ballot this November.

Billionaire businessman Jackson T. “Steve” Stephens’ legal challenge to a citizen-led petition to raise Arkansas’ minimum wage to $8.50 per hour will be voted on in the November general election as Issue No. 5, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The challenge was two-fold as Stephens argued that petition gatherers did not meet a July 4 deadline to submit signatures and that there were not enough initial signatures to qualify for a “cure” period, which allows an additional 30 days to collect potential voter signatures.

Many Democratic candidates, including Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and gubernatorial nominee Mike Ross, have advocated for the minimum wage proposal. Their opponents, U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Dardanelle, and Asa Hutchinson, have also said they would vote for the measure.

In a recent Talk Business & Politics-Hendrix College Poll, 69% of voters said they supported the minimum wage increase, while 26% opposed.

In handing down its decision on Stephens’ two legal challenges, the state’s high court said the group leading the minimum wage proposal, Give Arkansas a Raise Now (GARN), did present enough signatures to qualify for the cure period to extend their collection deadline. The court said the signatures did not have to be proven valid, merely present when the petitions were filed.

“While Stephens would have this court hold that fraud is an appropriate consideration for purposes of the initial-count determination, it simply is not,” the court ruled.

“To that end, our inquiry is this: Did GARN’s petition, at the time of filing, contain on its face a sufficient number of signatures pursuant to the statewide and fifteen-county requirement, such that the Secretary of State’s grant of the thirty-day cure period was proper? We hold that it did and therefore that the grant of the cure period was proper,” the decision also stated.

On the July 4 deadline petition, the court said precedent allowed for the petitions to be turned in on the next legal work day, since the Fourth of July holiday closed offices on Friday of this year and the Secretary of State’s office was closed then and over the weekend.

“The deadline for petitions, such as the one at issue here, was July 7, 2014. Accordingly, Stephens’s timeliness claim fails too. Because we conclude that neither of Stephens’s claims is meritorious, we deny his original-action complaint seeking to remove Issue No. 5 from the ballot. The mandate shall issue immediately,” the court said in its opinion.

Pryor issued a statement following the Supreme Court ruling. He noted in his press release that Stephens, chairman of the conservative Club for Growth, was the biggest contributor to his challenger, Rep. Cotton.

“This decision was the right one for hardworking Arkansas families, and now it’s up to voters to turn out and support a pay raise for 170,000 families struggling to make ends meet. I was glad to be the first elected official to endorse the minimum wage ballot initiative, and we’ll know on November 4th if enough voters agree it’s the right thing for our state,” Pryor said.

Stephens released a statement saying he was disappointed that the Supreme Court was “embracing and institutionalizing ‘fraud’ in the initiated act process.”

“We are very disappointed in this decision,” Stephens said. “Today, the Arkansas Supreme Court unanimously stated that ‘While Stephens would have this court hold that fraud is an appropriate consideration for the purposes of the initial-count determination, it is not,’” Stephens said, quoting from the decision.

“It is shameful that, according to our Supreme Court, fraud is not a consideration in this matter of public trust, and now the whole ballot initiative process is open to fraud. It is even more shocking that there wasn’t a single dissent, indicating that all 7 justices embraced this decision and its long-term implications on future generations,” Stephens said.

He also called for a judicial recall process in response to the decision.

“Decisions like this are the reasons that I chaired the Merit Selection Committee of the Arkansas Bar Association in the mid-1980s. As a political consideration, a change to a merit selection process was not possible then, and is probably not possible now. But, a judicial-recall provision as an initiated act is the most appropriate response to this and other shocking judicial decisions Arkansans have been subjected to this year,” Stephens added.