A federal judge in Arkansas has thrown out a handful of state laws that put extra restrictions on citizen efforts to gather signatures for ballot initiatives, agreeing with challengers that they violated the constitutional free speech rights of voters.
The decision handed several victories to the League of Women Voters of Arkansas and other plaintiffs, which sued last year amid efforts in various states to make it harder for regular citizens to make laws or amend their states’ constitution through ballot initiatives.
One such measure required someone signing a petition to show photo ID. That and other additional ballot-initiative restrictions were imposed by Arkansas’ GOP-controlled state government after election officials cited a legal technicality to reject petitions submitted by abortion rights supporters in a 2024 effort to legalize abortion in the conservative state.
One of the plaintiffs, Protect AR Rights, called the decision an “important victory for the people of Arkansas and their constitutional right to direct democracy.”
The decision, issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks, also rejected some challenges by the league and its fellow plaintiffs, while Brooks sent three other disputes to trial.
The defendant, Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester, a Republican who had defended the laws in court, said in a statement that his office plans to appeal Brooks’ decision and “will fight tirelessly for common sense safeguards like voter ID.”
Among the laws Brooks struck down are 2025 measures requiring canvassers to verify a petition signers’ identity through a photo ID and to read the ballot question aloud or require a petition signer to read the entire ballot question before signing it. The ballot questions are often hundreds of words long.
Requiring a petition signer to possess and present a photo ID “before engaging in core political speech” plainly violates free speech laws, Brooks wrote, and noted that the Arkansas secretary of state’s office reviews every signature to confirm that the petition signer is a registered voter.
The ID requirement regulates what a registered voter “must do before signing a petition and what a canvasser must do before allowing them to,” Brooks wrote. “This impedes supporters of a measure from expressing their views by signing a petition.”
State officials had contended that requiring a reading of the ballot question before anyone can sign a petition was necessary to prevent a canvasser from misrepresenting the ballot question.
But Brooks wrote that the state had refused to prosecute reported cases of such canvasser misconduct, and that it should enforce its existing laws before it chose a more restrictive alternative of “imposing burdensome speech codes on good and bad actors alike.”
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Marc Levy, The Associated Press
