Elaine Williams, a volunteer canvasser for citizen-led ballot measures for many years, talks about the importance of preserving Arkansas’ constitutional protections for citizen initiatives at a rally in the Old State Supreme Court room at the state Capitol on Feb. 17, 2025. (Photo by Sonny Albarado/Arkansas Advocate)
Imagine for a moment a volunteer canvasser in Arkansas collecting signatures for a ballot initiative in the summer sun, say at a farmers market or a street fair.
After greeting an interested voter, the trained canvasser explains the ballot measure and checks the voter’s name against the state voter database to verify registration and confirm that the name and address on the petition match the database. Voters who have questions can review the actual language of the initiative, which by law is attached to the petition.
Then, once a petition is full, the canvasser attests to the validity of the signatures by signing at the bottom in the presence of a notary public, for eventual submission to the secretary of state.
Now, let’s consider the same canvasser if a pernicious package of bills making their way through the Legislature becomes law.
The canvasser would have to ask the voter for a photo ID and could not collect a signature, even from a registered voter, without it. After warning the voter that petition fraud is a crime, the canvasser would have to read the full ballot title to the voter or make sure the voter read it themselves. A canvasser who messes up in any of those steps could face criminal prosecution.
The process could go from two minutes to 15. Multiply by 90,000, and the burden becomes enormous. Which, of course, is the point.
Arkansas legislators are currently considering changes to the ballot initiative process that are reactive and politically motivated and focus on talking points raised by opponents of last year’s initiatives — continuing a quest by Republican politicians to disingenuously nibble away at direct democracy, which they find dangerous, distasteful and inconvenient.
The levels of obstruction were so effective last year that just one of nine citizen-led initiatives survived all the obstacles to be decided at the ballot box — a constitutional amendment undoing a casino in Pope County that was almost entirely financed by out-of-state gambling interests.
Not content with that success, the nibblers are back for another serving, motivated by a distrust of voters and a desire to keep control of policymaking in the hands of a legislative elite. If they succeed, direct democracy will still exist in Arkansas, but perhaps in name only.
“It’s a power grab,” says Bill Kopsky, executive director of Arkansas Public Policy Panel and one of the leaders of the unsuccessful Educational Rights Amendment initiative last year. “Legislators don’t like voters to have power, and the lobbyists who influence the legislators don’t like voters to have power.”
Kopsky also thinks some legislators are simply incredulous that the democratic energy seen during last year’s ballot initiative campaigns was real: “They just don’t believe there can be a majority of Arkansans who disagree with them. Ergo, it must be fraud.”
The most menacing proposals before the Legislature come from Republican Sen. Kim Hammer of Benton, who is launching his 2026 campaign for secretary of state by trying to disembowel an initiative process that, if elected, he would oversee.
Hammer’s package of bills includes the provisions to require photo ID, warn voters of fraud and read the ballot title. He would also require thousands of volunteer canvassers to file an affidavit with the secretary of state attesting that they’re aware of the rules and the penalties for violating them.
The secretary of state would also have expanded power to reject signatures if he finds “by a preponderance of evidence” that a canvasser violated the law — a powerful tool that a secretary could use to derail a proposal he personally opposes.
Hammer’s proposals have passed the Senate. A House committee this week pulled the bill requiring the voter fraud warning (to clarify a possible conflict in statute) but advanced the photo ID and canvasser affidavit requirements.
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During a Senate committee hearing on his package of bills, Hammer said they were necessary because some voters had been “tricked” into signing petitions last year, an assertion based on vague, anecdotal claims from groups opposed to 2024 ballot campaigns on legal abortion and education reform.
The trickery claims insult the intelligence and agency of voters. They are also ironic because disinformation in the education reform and abortion initiatives came not from their sponsors but their opponents, who provided misleading, fantastical cost estimates for universal pre-K and insinuated to voters that the abortion amendment would legalize elective abortions up to the moment of birth.
Secretary of State Cole Jester came out in favor of Hammer’s proposals, which he said would protect the process from being “diluted by fraud” — a reference to people signing the same petition multiple times, a common practice that is not unusual when multiple petition drives are going on simultaneously and people accidentally sign more than once.
However, duplicate signatures are already flagged, and not counted, when the secretary of state verifies signatures. Showing photo ID, reading the ballot title or requiring canvasser affidavits will do nothing to prevent them.
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Hammer’s proposals appear to violate the Arkansas Constitution, which only allows legal restrictions on the initiative process to prevent fraud, as well as the federal First Amendment’s protection of core political speech absent a compelling state interest to limit it.
“They’re clearly unconstitutional. There’s not a one of them that will survive a constitutional challenge,” said David Couch, a Little Rock attorney involved in numerous ballot initiative campaigns who has litigated previous attempts to truncate direct democracy.
Meanwhile, Rep. David Ray — who served as chief of staff to now Attorney General Tim Griffin when he was lieutenant governor — wants to give Griffin’s office sweeping new powers to unilaterally disqualify ballot proposals that conflict with federal law, which appears clearly aimed at stopping legalization of marijuana that is still illegal federally.
Couch believes giving the attorney general quasi-judicial authority to make unilateral, binding disqualification decisions violates the separation of powers.
“The attorney general is just the attorney general. He does have the ability to give opinions, but they’re just opinions,” Couch said.
Couch said Ray’s proposal is also an end run around Arkansas Supreme Court decisions in 2012 and 2016 that allowed sponsors of medical marijuana initiatives to overcome the federal prohibition on cannabis by acknowledging it to voters in the ballot title.
Another of Ray’s proposals — to prohibit groups from submitting more than one ballot proposal on the same issue — appears to be a reaction to last year’s campaign to protect the Freedom of Information Act, when sponsors proposed both a constitutional amendment and an initiated act for legal and tactical seasons.
Because of the time constraints in the ballot approval process, Couch says it’s also not unusual for sponsors to submit multiple versions of the same proposal to get at least one approved before the deadline. If signed by the governor, Ray’s bill will prohibit them from using that strategy.
Ray is also proposing two constitutional amendments, one ending the 30-day cure period for petition campaigns to remedy problems with signatures and another requiring initiatives to pass in a majority of Arkansas’ 75 counties, allowing voters in the 38 smallest counties, with 15% of the state’s population, to block an initiative even if it passed statewide.
Unfortunately for Ray, constitutional amendments need approval from Arkansas voters, who soundly rejected changes in the initiative process, including ending the cure period, in both 2020 and 2022. Opponents of direct democracy, who would no doubt just chuck the initiative process if they could, have to be keenly aware of the futility of a full-frontal assault.
Much easier to nibble — and leave Regnat Populus less and less regnant.