This Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Indivisible Arkansas is hosting a petition-signing event at White Water Tavern in Little Rock. According to organizers, volunteers for all of the ballot-initiative petitions currently being circulated will be present to collect signatures at this event, giving Arkansas-registered voters an opportunity to sign every petition they want to support in one fell swoop.
The six petitions for which signatures will be collected at the event are:
- The Arkansas Abortion Amendment, by Arkansans for Limited Government. This amendment would protect access to abortion in Arkansas up to 18 weeks of pregnancy and would allow abortions after 18 weeks in cases of rape, incest or fatal fetal anomaly or to protect the health and life of the mother.
- The Educational Rights Amendment, by For AR Kids. This would create free, voluntary access to Pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds and afterschool and summer programs for all school-age children, would improve special education, establishes minimum standards for all Arkansas schools and requires that any school receiving state funds meets those requirements.
- Act to Remove the Sales & Use Tax for Menstrual Products and Diapers, by Arkansas Period Project. Would remove the sales and use taxes — also known as the “pink tax” — from menstrual products as well as diapers.
- Arkansas Government Disclosure Act (FOIA), by Arkansas Citizens for Transparency. This is the companion act to the FOIA amendment the group is also pushing, and it clarifies and defines several pieces of the FOIA amendment and establishes a Transparency Commission.
- The Arkansas Government Disclosure Amendment (FOIA), by Arkansas Citizens for Transparency. This would enshrine the Freedom of Information Act in the Arkansas Constitution, would roll back changes made in the 2023 special session, would limit the General Assembly’s ability to modify the FOIA and would clarify that the state may be sued for FOIA violations.
- The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment, by Arkansans for Patient Access. This expands who can prescribe medical marijuana, allows patients to grow their own marijuana for medical use, removes fees associated with applying for a medical-marijuana card and allows patient assessments via telehealth.
Signing a petition does not mean that a person has to vote for the initiative. It only means the person wants the item to appear on the November ballot so Arkansans can decide for themselves whether to approve the various measures.
Indivisible’s signing event comes barely a week after Little Rock police, who said they were acting on orders from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, threatened signature gatherers with arrest during a food giveaway at the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission offices. While cooler heads and the First Amendment ultimately prevailed and volunteers were allowed to collect signatures as long as they did not impede traffic, officials with the Little Rock Police Department and MLK Commission continued to make excuses for their actions over the past week.
In the hours after the MLK Commission event, LRPD suddenly changed their story. LRPD spokesman Mark Nelson told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the volunteers had been stopped because volunteers were blocking traffic and because a volunteer with the MLK commission claimed she heard signature gatherers telling someone they would have to sign a petition to get any food from the commission’s giveaway.
Neither of those claims match what LRPD officers on the scene were saying when they were threatening volunteers with arrest, however. On the contrary, LRPD Officer Christopher Tollette explicitly said the signature gathering was stopped at the direction of the commission and the Governor:
As an officer of the police department, I’m telling you that Governor Sanders and the Martin Luther King Commission, they don’t want nobody out here with petitions. That’s what I already said. Everybody else was semi-peaceful, they said, “Hey, I don’t necessarily believe you, but I’ll go talk to the head of the commission.” But if we’re gonna do this, what may end up happening is you may get arrested, ok?
Additionally, when pressed on his claim that volunteers were telling people they had to sign a petition as part of the food giveaway, Edwards said LRPD officers were not able to identify which of the volunteers allegedly said that.
Kristin Stuart, one of the volunteers on site at the MLK Commission event, disputed that any volunteers would have made such a statement.
“It’s outrageous and absurd for the LRPD to accuse us of linking food-box distribution to petition signing,” Stewart said. “Not only is it false, but it also implies a serious crime,” she said, adding that “none of the volunteer canvassers were informed of such conditions by the LRPD officers.”
LRPD’s post hoc excuses notwithstanding, the people collecting signatures near the MLK Commission event were on public property, engaging in protected political speech. The First Amendment does not yield to unsubstantiated third-person allegations about what a volunteer said to someone or baseless claims that people were blocking traffic.
The good news for volunteers is no one will be able to stop the signature-gathering event at White Water Tavern on Saturday, much to the likely chagrin of both the governor and LRPD.