The Quality Education and Jobs initiative campaign filed their petition signatures with the Secretary of State Bennett’s office yesterday. The filing is expected to face at least one legal challenge.
Organizers of the campaign left out important language on the petitions presented to voters, as required by law. Last week, Bennett said that he would not accept any petitions that had the incorrect language attached to them. The matter will likely go to court.
State election officials will meet this week with representatives both from the initiative campaign and its opponents, including Arizona Tax Research Association (ATRA), which discovered the inconsistency between the petitions and the initiative on file with Bennett’s office. The matter will likely go to court.
State law gives the office 20 business days to determine how many valid signatures were submitted and complete a random 5 percent sample for verification. The county recorders will then have 15 business days to verify the signers in the random sample. If that random sampling tabulation establishes that the valid signatures will total at least the 172,809 required to qualify for the ballot, the measure will go before voters.
ATRA calls the Quality Education and Jobs (QEJ) Initiative the most complicated earmarking effort to ever be placed before Arizona voters.