Caroline Downey of National Review Online reports good news for school choice supporters.
The teachers’ union-backed campaign to overturn school-choice expansion in Arizona has failed due to a shortfall in signatures, the state’s secretary of state announced Thursday.
Under the expansion of Arizona’s universal-voucher program, known as the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), enacted in June, over one million K-12 public school students in the state will become eligible to receive vouchers to fund their attendance at private, charter, or home schools, up from the 11,000 students who are currently eligible. To subject the expansion to a referendum, the anti-school-choice advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona had to collect 118,823 valid signatures.
After completing the statutorily prescribed review of petition sheets and signatures enclosed in them, Secretary Katie Hobbs and her office determined that the initiative does not “meet the constitutional minimum” and therefore “will not qualify for the 2024 General Election Ballot.”
“The number of petition signatures eligible for verification will fail to meet the constitutional minimum of 118,823 signatures” required by state law, Arizona state elections director Kori Lorick wrote Thursday.
Prior to Hobbs’ statement, pro-school choice think tanks had run their own preliminary calculations of Save Our Schools’ prospects based on their observations of early petitions.
As of Monday, the Goldwater Institute and Center for Arizona Policy, who reportedly had observers watching the petitions as they were scanned Friday, claimed that fewer than 89,000 signatures had been filed.
Anti-school-choice activists submitted 8,175 petition sheets, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s office, which they needed to fill with about 17.3 signatures per sheet to have their initiative succeed. However, there are only 15 lines per sheet, the AZ Mirror noted, making it improbable that the organization amassed enough support to derail the buildout of ESA. For instance, some sheets only had two signatures, school-choice advocate Corey DeAngelis found.