(FixThisNation.com) – On Wednesday, the Arkansas Secretary of State rejected the initiative for passing an abortion-rights ballot measure that would make abortion available everywhere in the state until the 18th week of pregnancy.
Limited Government, the group that is pushing the initiative, according to a letter by Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston failed to submit the necessary statements regarding paid signature gatherers. On Friday the group had announced that they had gathered over 100,000 signatures, which exceeds the requirement for putting forward a state constitutional amendment of over 90,000 signatures.
If the measure had gone through, the state constitution would have been amended to block the state government from putting forward any measure that would penalize, restrict, or prohibit abortion access in all situations up to the 18th week of pregnancy.
Arkansas currently has a total ban on abortions, with the only exception being cases where abortion is necessary to save a patient’s life.
According to Thurston, the group failed to include a statement that would confirm that all canvassers were provided with the proper documentation, prior to the start of the signature collection. He added that other sponsors of initiative petitions have previously not failed to comply with this requirement which is why he rejected the submission.
Arkansas for Limited Government stated that the statement had been emailed over a dozen times, and requested for an extension in order to provide a hard copy to the office.
Thurston argued that out of the total submitted signatures, around 14,100 had been gathered by paid canvassers. The remaining votes would be around 3,300 below the 90,000-vote threshold. He added that even if he could accept the submission, he would still consider the petition to be insufficient as they did not obtain the 90,704 signatures that were required.
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