Alcohol bid shy of ballot in 5th Arkansas county

A Randolph County circuit judge ruled Tuesday that petition signatures gathered to place an alcohol sales measure on the county's November ballot were insufficient, making it the fifth Arkansas county to fall short in attempts this year.

After a three-day bench trial in Pocahontas last week, Judge Phil Smith ruled that Randolph County Clerk Rhonda Blevins was correct in rejecting 361 signatures in support of calling an election. Petitioners were required to gather 3,813 certified signatures, or 38 percent of the registered voters in the northeast Arkansas county.

"The Court finds that the petition is not sufficient to allow the local option election called for by the petition to be placed on the Nov. 8 general election ballot," Smith wrote in his ruling.

Johnson and Independence counties also had measures denied because petition signatures fell short.

Proponents of alcohol sales in Crawford County also failed to gather enough signatures by the deadline Tuesday, and voters there will not see the issue on their ballot. Nor will Yell County hold an alcohol sales election, after petitioners earlier abandoned their effort upon realization that they would not collect enough signatures.

Last week, Independence County Circuit Judge Tim Weaver, like Smith, said petitioners did not collect a sufficient number of signatures to call for the county election.

Little River County Clerk Deanna Silvey certified enough names on petitions gathered in that county and has placed the issue on the county ballot.

"We are disappointed," Linda Bowlin, committee chairman of Keep Revenue in Randolph County, said of Smith's ruling. "We learned a lot. We learned the law is fraught with land mines."

She said the organization will talk with its lawyers to determine whether it will appeal Smith's decision.

"It may be fruitless," Bowlin said.

"We learned the law is very, very difficult to follow," she said.

The Randolph County group challenged Blevins' rejection of 169 pages of petitions because they contained names of unregistered voters, duplicate signatures, or signatures that did not match signatures on voters' registration cards.

Bowlin's signature was rejected because it was on the same page as that of an unregistered voter who lived in Black Rock, which is located in Lawrence County.

Keep Revenue in Randolph County challenged Ark. Code Ann., Section 3-8-811(b) (6), which allowed for the rejection of a full page of valid signatures if one or more names were not valid, saying the code was invalidated by Act 1413 of 2013. That act, said Bowlin, a retired Pocahontas attorney, allowed county clerks to remove only unregistered names rather than full pages.

The group relied on McDaniel v. Spencer, a 2015 Arkansas case that questioned the practice of rejecting valid signatures on petitions.

In that case, the Arkansas Supreme Court found that if there is "no evidence of improper motives on the part of the canvasser, only individual signatures are called into question, not the entire petition part."

Smith said in his ruling Tuesday that McDaniel v. Spencer was not applicable to the Randolph County case.

"The Spencer case involved a statewide initiative and constitutional challenges against regulations adopted by the General Assembly under its expressly limited authority to regulate initiatives as set forth in Amendment 7," he wrote in his decision.

"Spencer has no application to the constitutional challenge levied in this case against a statute regulating the sufficiency of local-option petitions," he wrote. "The present case involves a countywide local option in which the State has a compelling interest in protecting the integrity of the petition process by limiting petitioners to residents of the county. The Court therefore declines to apply McDaniel v. Spencer."

On Monday, a Johnson County circuit judge ruled there was an insufficient number of signatures to place an alcohol sales measure on the county's Nov. 8 general election ballot. In that case, Johnson County Clerk Michelle Frost rejected 154 pages of signatures because they contained names of nonregistered voters in the county.

"There were too many legal loopholes," said Susan Edens, spokesman for Keep Our Dollars in Johnson County, the group that was trying to put the alcohol sales measure on the ballot in that county. "There were too many strikes against us with the procedure.

"There was no rule book at our fingertips," she said. "I wonder if we have to fail at this the first time to get an idea how to do it. We learned for the next time, and there will definitely be a next time."

Bud Roberts, the director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control agency, said attempts at alcohol sales measures are on the increase because major store chains are pursuing alcohol revenue.

"Any county that contains a Wal-Mart will have good interest," he said. "It makes good business sense."

Of Arkansas' 75 counties, 39 allow alcohol sales, or are "wet," he said.

The state's counties that are "dry" usually voted to ban alcohol sales in the 1930s or 1940s. Local lore in several counties has been that women voted to "go dry" when men were off to war and were unable to vote on the measures, Roberts said.

"Alcohol will always be controversial in the South," Roberts said. "There seems to be a considerable push against it from the churches. People have strong opinions about it on either side."

He said that in the past when he was approached by petitioners, they would ask first if he was a resident of the county in which petitioners were gathering signatures.

"Now they ask if I am interested in whatever issue they were talking about," Roberts said. "That may be one reason why these issues are failing."

Bowlin said her group will probably try again in two years to place the alcohol sales measure on the Randolph County general-election ballot.

"We certainly respect the court's ruling today, but we are disappointed," Bowlin said Tuesday afternoon. "We learned a lot, and that may help us for the next try."

A Section on 08/31/2016

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