Manuel Galdamez, a member of Rural Arizonans for Accountability, walks through a neighborhood in northern Pima County to gather signatures for a petition || PHOTO BY NATHAN BROWN/ARIZONA CAPITOL TIMES
Opinion: Arizona already has tough requirements to place citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. Lawmakers need better reasons to make them even tougher.
Abe Kwok
Arizona Republic
Not every effort to restrict citizens-led initiatives is meritless. Or even unpopular.
The 2022 election offered ample proof.
Arizonans approved two of the three initiatives to tighten standards — one requiring 60% approval or more on ballot measures to raise taxes, the other limiting them to a single subject.
While I had reservations of varying degrees about all three proposals, I believe Arizonans got it right.
Will they do so again with the latest Legislature-referred measure to curb voters’ powers of redress?
All 30 districts would need signatures
The 2024 ballot proposal makes gathering signatures to qualify a citizens-led initiative that much more difficult.
Voters have greater reasons to be skeptical this time.
To qualify a measure for the ballot now, citizens need the signatures of 10% of the turnout in the most recent gubernatorial election. For constitutional amendments, the percentage goes up to 15%.
There are no restrictions on where the signatures are gathered.
In practice, backers concentrate on Maricopa, Pima and a handful of other populous counties because they get the best bang for their buck spent on petition-circulators.
The initiative referred by the Legislature would mandate that the 10% and 15% threshold on signatures are met in all 30 legislative districts.
