School voucher advocates sue to keep ESA reform measure off the November ballot

The Goldwater Institute, is attempting to convince a court to block the “Protect Education, Accountability Now Act” from the November ballot by disqualifying tens of thousands of voter signatures supporting it. 

The citizens initiative, headed by public schools advocacy organization, Save Our Schools Arizona, turned in more than 420,000 signatures to the secretary of state on the July 2 deadline. That’s well over the 256,000 signature threshold needed to qualify for the ballot. 

But the conservative Goldwater Institute, on behalf school voucher parents and school choice advocates, and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club said in the lawsuit filed Monday that more than 73,000 of those signatures should be disqualified because the circulators who collected them weren’t qualified or properly registered, or they included inaccurate or insufficient information on their petition sheets.

The backers of the initiative to reform the private school voucher system panned the signature challenge as “predictable.”

“They’re doing this for one reason only: they know it will pass in November.

This is the latest in a series of attacks from out-of-state, billionaire-funded organizations like the American Federation for Children, aimed at leaving Arizona’s (voucher)  program, simply as it is, plagued by waste, fraud and abuse,” the Protect Education Act campaign wrote on Facebook.

In the suit, the private school voucher advocates called the Protect Education Act “an initiative measure that would largely dismantle Arizona’s groundbreaking Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which offers parents choice and independence to secure the best educational experience for their child’s unique needs.”

Even if all of the signatures challenged in the lawsuit were disqualified, the Protect Education Act would still have a 100,000-signature cushion. But the Goldwater Institute said it planned to amend the lawsuit to challenge more signatures after Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, alongside the county recorders, strikes ineligible signatures they identified and determines the signature validity rate for the petitions. 

After that, attorney for Goldwater, Kory Langhofer wrote that the Protect Education Act would be below the threshold to qualify for the ballot. 

The Goldwater Institute was a driving force behind the creation of the ESA school voucher system, and the program is staunchly backed by the Free Enterprise Club.

The Protect Education Act would put a $150,000 household income cap on participation in the universal school voucher program. It would also claw back unused funds to provide to public schools, prohibit the purchase of luxury items with ESA money and require fingerprint clearance for workers in voucher-supported schools and programs.

If the Protect Education Act makes it onto the November ballot, it will compete with a referral from the Republican-controlled state legislature aimed at enshrining ESA protections into the state’s constitution. The legislature’s ballot referral, pushed through in the last hours of the legislative session in June, would make the Protect Education Act moot.

In a Monday statement, the Goldwater Institute wrote that the Protect Education Act was “destructive and misleadingly titled” and that it “seeks to restrict the educational freedoms of Arizona families and lock children into failing government-run schools in perpetuity.”

While advocates of the ESA program, including the Goldwater Institute, say that it has “rigorous guardrails to prevent misspending,” that hasn’t been the reality, which has seen parents using the voucher money on unallowed purchases like major appliances and lingerie. A spring report from the Arizona Auditor General found that the program’s oversight was “haphazard” and riddled with gaps.

In a 880-page spreadsheet that accompanied Goldwater’s legal challenge, the organization pointed out nine petition circulators who had been convicted of a felony and never had their right to vote restored, or who had been convicted of fraud, forgery or identity theft, barring them from working as petition gatherers. 

Some of the convictions were for serious crimes like kidnapping, assault and sexual abuse of a minor. 

“Did they know who was approaching Arizona families and asking for their personal information and signatures?” Michael Abate, a spokesman for the Free Enterprise Club, wrote in a statement. “And how can they claim to protect children while apparently failing to properly vet the people representing their campaign?”

The Goldwater Institute argued that other signatures should be disqualified because the people who collected them listed a hotel address instead of their home address, didn’t write their identification number on the front and back of the sheet, wrote it illegibly or wrote different numbers on the front and back. 

Langhofer also challenged signatures collected by circulators who provided a nonfunctional telephone number or email address, or one that didn’t belong to them, on their petition sheets.

“This is a shameless attack on Arizona’s parents, funded by an out of state union,” Victor Riches, CEO of the Goldwater Institute, said in a statement. “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.”