The parents and educators who gathered signatures successfully met the legal requirements–and surpassed them–to get a referendum on the ballot in 2018 on vouchers. The legislature recently passed a law to extend vouchers to everyone, removing all limitations. Arizona’s public schools are already underfunded. Vouchers, even if few apply, as is typically the case, will drain even more resources from the public schools.
The referendum will be known as Proposition 305.
According to the Blog for Arizona, quoting the Arizona Capitol Times:
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has validated 86.6 percent of a sample of signatures collected by Save Our Schools Arizona, putting the school voucher referendum on track to reach the 2018 ballot.
The majority of the roughly 108,000 signatures deemed valid by the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office were gathered in Maricopa County, and now, SOS Arizona’s statewide validation average sits at about 87 percent overall.
That gives SOS Arizona a comfortable margin of error; with an 86 percent validation rate, the referendum would have nearly 93,000 valid signatures, about 18,000 more than it needs to make it to the ballot.
Elections Director Eric Spencer reiterated what Reagan announced via social media, adding that barring the pending legal challenges SOS Arizona still faces, the outlook for the referendum is “sunny.” He anticipated a notice of certification would be sent to the governor’s office on Sept. 11, the deadline for the remaining three counties to report results.
But if those counties were to report tomorrow, Spencer said, the Secretary of State’s Office is ready to certify what will be billed as Proposition 305 on the 2018 general election ballot.
Results from Cochise, Yavapai and Yuma counties are still pending.
“We feel like this validates – pun intended – everything that we’ve been saying all along,” said SOS Arizona spokeswoman Dawn Penich-Thacker.
“You don’t get rates like that by cutting corners or trying to cheat the rules, and this speaks loudly to the fact that we played by the rules, we did it right, we took incredible care to ensure every voter who signed would be heard,” she said, referring to allegations made in a lawsuit against the referendum. “At this point, the voucher proponents are opposing the voters of Arizona.”
The first of two lawsuits filed against the petitions was dropped–the one implying that the petitions were gathered by paid felons. The second lawsuit–which criticizes the signatures–is unlikely to succeed.
The voucher proponents, says another source in this story, are “coming unglued” at the prospect of facing a referendum where the public gets its say. The voucher supporters are the Goldwater Institute (Arizona-based), Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers, also known as the Kochtopus), and American Federation for Children (the Betsy DeVos creation, which should be renamed Americans for Vouchers or Americans for the Elimination of Public Schools).
This is a big win for advocates for public schools. Please go to the SOS Arizona page and donate whatever you can to help them. They are facing billionaires, and the billionaires will try to exhaust the resources and energy of SOS with frivolous lawsuits.
Give whatever you can. I have contributed. If you can send $5 or $10 or $50 or $100, or more, please do.
They need our help!!!
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