Arizona Supreme Court says petition circulators must respond when subpoenaed News
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Arizona Supreme Court says petition circulators must respond when subpoenaed

The Supreme Court of Arizona ruled on Wednesday that petition circulators must appear before the court when they are subpoenaed.

This decision was made in the context of a failed attempt to qualify initiative C-03-2018 for inclusion onto the November 2018 ballot. This initiative was commonly known as the “Stop Political Dirty Money Amendment.”

In order to qualify, petition circulators had to gather signatures from 15% of qualified electors, which equated to 225,963 signatures. After the initial review of signatures, Arizona’s Secretary of State, Michele Reagan, deemed 263,000 signatures to be valid, which was above the 15% threshold. At the time of final review, the estimated total of valid signatures dropped to 223,892, which was below the 15% threshold.

During the signature review process, a complaint was filed by a separate party of petitioners under § 19-118(D), which challenged the initiative’s petition circulators and the signatures they had gathered. These objections included “that [petition circulator] registrations were defective, they were ineligible to circulate petitions, and they were improperly paid based upon the number of signatures gathered.” Fifteen petition circulators were subpoenaed, which accounted for 0.6% of circulators, but there was no response to the subpoenas. As a result, a trial court disqualified 8,824 signatures collected by these individuals.

In response, proponents of the initiative challenged the trial court’s decision based on three statutes:

A.R.S. § 19-102.01(A), which requires strict construction of, and compliance with, constitutional and statutory requirements for statewide initiative measures; § 19-122(A), which governs the Secretary’s duties to accept and file a petition for an initiative or referendum; and § 19-118(C), which invalidates any petition signatures obtained by a registered circulator properly served with a subpoena who fails to appear for trial.

The Supreme Court chose to construe § 19-118(C) and § 19-102.01(A) in a way that avoided constitutional issues. Instead, the court focused on § 19-122(C) and found this statute to be valid because it preserves the integrity of signature gathering by reasonable means. By failing to appear in court, subpoenaed petition circulators violated this integrity and prejudiced the fact-finding process. The exclusion of their gathered signatures and the exclusion of the initiative from the November ballot were deemed appropriate.

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