A teachers union and its allies are trying to undermine one of the nation’s top school choice programs via a deceptive ballot initiative. But its reliance on felons convicted of heinous crimes, including manslaughter, kidnapping, human trafficking, and sexual abuse of a minor, to gather signatures for their initiative may be their undoing.
“This is a shameless attack on Arizona’s parents, funded by an out-of-state union,” said Victor Riches, president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute, which is challenging the union’s initiative in court. “They’re trying to game the system by turning in tens of thousands of invalid signatures in an effort to destroy the most successful school choice program in the country. This won’t happen on our watch.”
The Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona announced late last month that they had submitted roughly 415,000 signatures for the Orwellian-named Protect Education Act, a ballot initiative that would impose numerous harmful restrictions on Arizona’s popular education savings account program, including kicking out at least 20,000 of the more than 100,000 K–12 students that the program currently serves.
Organizers framed it as a decisive win. It isn’t.
The number clears the 255,949 signatures required for a ballot initiative — but clearing the legal minimum and surviving the verification process that follows are two very different things.
School choice opponents would need a 62% signature validity rate, and the national average rate is in the mid-to-high 70s. However, Arizona’s review process is unusually exacting: a missing date, an illegible address, or a petition sheet separated from its accompanying text can void every signature on the page.
The Goldwater Institute’s complaint meticulously challenges the validity of more than half of the union-backed initiative’s signatures. If their challenges succeed, the union could be left with fewer than 200,000 signatures — considerably below the ballot threshold.
According to Goldwater, most of the Protect Education Campaign’s signatures are invalid because they suffer from a variety of legal defects. Many signatures were not from registered voters. Others are invalid because the signature gatherer failed to fill out the initiative paperwork properly, such as listing a false address, failing to provide an ID, or failing to notarize the document.
Tens of thousands are duplicates. Registered voters are only allowed to sign the petition once.
Still more are invalid because the circulator made “deliberate material misrepresentations” to voters, such as the circulator caught on video falsely claiming to work for the Arizona secretary of state. It is a criminal offense in Arizona to impersonate a public servant.
Most shocking of all, tens of thousands of signatures are invalid because the paid petition circulator was convicted of a felony or crimes involving fraud, forgery, or identity theft.
Goldwater’s complaint details how petition circulators paid by the union-backed campaign were previously convicted of crimes including manslaughter, attempted murder, kidnapping, transportation of illegal immigrants for profit, arson, stalking, burglary, carjacking, assault with a deadly weapon, welfare fraud, credit card forgery, perjury, selling or producing cocaine and methamphetamines, and more.
In one case, the petition circulator hired by the union-backed campaign was a level 3 sex offender — the highest level of sex offender in Arizona, reserved for those “with a high risk of another sex crime.” Although he was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and is prohibited from living near a school, he posted a photo of himself wearing a Protect Education Act T-shirt on social media.
There’s no guarantee that all the signature challenges will succeed, but school choice proponents are hopeful. According to Scot Mussi of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, a veteran of numerous ballot initiative fights, it’s plausible that the latest anti-school-choice ballot initiative will fall short. “In recent years, some measures have had nearly half their signatures invalidated,” said Mussi, who added that he had never seen so many convicted felons hired as petition circulators.
Arizonans have seen this movie before.
In 2022, Save Our Schools Arizona announced with similar fanfare that it had gathered 141,714 signatures to refer the state’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account expansion to the ballot — comfortably more, organizers insisted, than the 118,823 valid signatures required.
Within days, their self-proclaimed “historic victory” collapsed. A review of the digitized petition sheets by the Goldwater Institute and the Center for Arizona Policy found the group had actually turned in only 88,866 signatures — not just short of the threshold, but more than 50,000 fewer than the group itself had claimed days earlier.
Beth Lewis, the group’s executive director, ultimately conceded the campaign would fall short. “We just sometimes get things wrong,” she said at the time. That’s quite the understatement. Her count was off by 59%.
If school choice opponents fail to get enough valid signatures, the credit belongs to the local school choice coalition, especially AZ Loves ESAs and its network of volunteers who spent the spring on a “decline to sign” campaign.
AZ Loves ESA volunteers stood near signature gatherers for the anti-ESA ballot initiative to share their stories and persuade voters not to sign the petitions. By the campaign’s own numbers, nearly 4,000 supporters opted into activation alerts and mobilized, and more than 10,000 tuned into their tele-town hall. More than 415 members across its regional Facebook groups handled rapid-response communications in real time as new signature-gathering locations popped up around the state.
THERE IS A THIRD PATH ON STUDENT LOANS, AND VOTERS ALREADY AGREE ON IT
“We have worked tirelessly to defend against the anti-ESA ballot initiative, organically mobilizing and rallying citizens who believe that parents should have the freedom to choose the education that best meets their children’s needs,” said Jenny Clark of AZ Loves ESAs, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the ballot initiative. “We remain committed to protecting educational choice and will never stop fighting for students and families.”
Thanks to the tireless work of AZ Loves ESAs and the ESA parents who shared their own stories with Arizona voters, there’s real reason to hope that Arizona’s trailblazing school choice program will continue to give every family in the state the freedom to choose the education that works best for their child.
Jason Bedrick is a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
