Andrew DeMillo/AP Photo
Boxes containing signatures supporting a proposed ballot measure to scale back Arkansas’s abortion ban are delivered to a room in the state Capitol, July 5, 2024, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Arkansas voters have used direct-democracy powers granted by the state constitution to raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. Yet abortion is the one progressive issue that has never made it to a vote. The circumstances surrounding the failed 2024 campaign to end the state’s total abortion ban likely galvanized state lawmakers to make sure that it never does. In the 2025 legislative session that ended Wednesday, the Arkansas General Assembly passed more than a dozen bills that emasculate direct democracy, many of them nonsensical intrusions on Arkansans’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights.
In 2024, the “Arkansas Right to Abortion Initiative” could have appeared on the fall ballot but wasn’t there when counting began on November 5, not because of some abstruse legal challenge but because of a colossal paperwork screwup. Arkansans for Limited Government had collected more than 100,000 signatures; volunteers obtained 87,675, and paid canvassers, 14,143. Under state law, they only needed 90,704. But as the state attorney general’s office went through the documents, they pounced on an error: Organizers had failed to file required documentation with the paid bundles. Those were invalidated, leaving the campaign short of the threshold that they needed to get on the ballot.
Few people in Arkansas thought they would ever see tens of thousands of signatures collected for an abortion petition drive. A total abortion ban, however, complicates the lives of women and their families. But the campaign “had to be perfect,” and as the Arkansas Times detailed in a multipart series on the campaign, it wasn’t—which left an opening big enough for state lawmakers and their allies to drive right through. Abortion advocates have vowed to launch a new campaign. But to get even close to 100,000, they’ll have to run through a thicket of new laws that will make their job harder than ever.
Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers and have been trying to safeguard their own agendas from the ballot. “It’s really kind of three converging forces: the business class that hates the minimum wage, the right-wing, school privatization crowd that hates public schools, and then [there’s] the anti-abortion people,” says Bill Kopsky, the executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a social and economic justice group. (The state’s $11.00 minimum wage is the highest in the South.)
The religious right had been in the fight against direct-democracy curbs, along with groups like Kopsky’s. But the 2024 campaign changed that. “It’s because they know if abortion qualifies for the ballot, it passes with the voters,” Kopsky says. “So now they really want to slam the door shut on the people’s ability to make laws themselves.”
As do state lawmakers, who appear to be committed to stoking a peculiar kind of frustration for the citizens interested in circulating petitions. They’ve aimed to make getting on the ballot so complex and demoralizing that organizers and canvassers could be defeated simply by the heavy lift. Supporters of these latest hoop-jumps say the new requirements will combat fraud, which is already virtually nonexistent, and ensure that voters actually understand what they are signing.
State lawmakers aimed to make getting on the ballot so complex and demoralizing that organizers and canvassers could be defeated simply by the heavy lift.
Organizers will now have to furnish fiscal impact statements for every ballot measure, and ensure they are written at or below an eighth-grade reading level as defined by a specific readability formula. Signature gathering is a special target for onerous changes and will provide more avenues for potential disqualification. Anyone circulating statewide petitions must live in the state, or in the county, for local petitions. Before any individual signs a petition, a canvasser has to see a photo ID and then explain “petition fraud” (which is rare in the state) to the signer.
Kopsky calls the fraud concerns “a political dog whistle.” “We’ve explained that it’s actually not in the campaign’s interest to commit signature fraud, because our secretary of state’s office is pretty good at throwing bad signatures out. Most campaigns, including every one that we’ve ever been a part of, and all the other ones that I know of this last cycle, we all have crews verifying signatures as we go, because the last thing we want to do is actually turn in bad signatures.”
The canvasser’s job isn’t over yet. Next, they must read the “ballot title” to the signer or have the signer read it back to them. In Arkansas, the ballot title is a longer, sometimes complex explanation of what the initiative entails. Failure to follow this step is a misdemeanor offense.
“The estimated time to go through this process ranges from a couple of minutes up to 15 minutes,” says Kopsky. “All of these are nuisance amendments. Several of these issues potentially raise First Amendment issues, that is, infringements on the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances.”
Then there are the perilous shoals of paperwork. Canvassers now must file “true affidavits” specifying that they are in compliance with the state constitution “and laws related to fraud during petition signature gathering.” Signatures submitted without an affidavit will be tossed.
For the moment, voters have been spared new attempts to raise the threshold for ballot measure passage. Bills proposing to increase the threshold needed for passage to 66.7 percent, or passage by a majority of voters and counties, failed, as did a measure that would have allowed the legislature to amend constitutional amendments proposed by voters. But Arkansas legislators have a track record of coming back and passing ballot measure changes that voters have rejected. In 2020, voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have increased the number of counties where signatures had to be collected; lawmakers turned around and passed a bill doing just that three years later.
Meanwhile, with an eye to 2026, the League of Women Voters has proposed a citizen initiative ballot measure that would reform the entire ballot measure process by clarifying the roles of the attorney general, secretary of state, state supreme court, and General Assembly. This week, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin sent the measure back to the LWV a second time, noting that the organization, in resolving some concerns, had introduced new ones.
Arkansas voters increasingly view state lawmakers as indifferent to their concerns, echoes of what I learned about the initiative process in South Dakota. Arkansas lawmakers are more committed to staying in power and wielding it on behalf of their own social and economic agendas.
“Most issues around quality of life, frankly, are not terribly partisan,” says Kopsky. “In Arkansas, our minimum wage would still be $7.25, if it weren’t for direct democracy. We wouldn’t have any campaign finance laws [or] ethics laws. Medical marijuana would still be illegal. The things that we’ve passed through ballot measures have been really important to the state and are hugely popular. People care about their schools, and they don’t care about all this ideological baloney.”
