Their web site says: “We did it!”
Arkansas Term Limits reported collecting over 135,000 signatures, about 60% more signatures than the 84,859 signatures required to send constitutional amendments to ballot. The amendment for which they have collected petitions would impose ten-year term limits on service in the state legislature as a whole. July 6 was the deadline for turning in the petitions.
When petition signatures are audited by a government body, some usually end up being disqualified for one reason or another. The petitioners hope that the 50,000-signature margin for error will be more than enough to compensate for any tossing of individual signatures.
The measure would give Arkansas voters a chance to rectify a gutting of term limits put over in 2014. The 2014 ballot measure had been foisted by lawmakers as an “ethics” reform. But the real—and carefully hidden—purpose was to lengthen their maximum tenure in office.
The law that voters passed in 1992 limited house members to three two-year terms and senators to two four-year terms. The 2014 law would enable lawmakers to serve 16 years, all in a single chamber. (The maximum tenure can be even longer in some cases, because reapportionment of districts every ten years results in two-year senate terms for half of incumbent senators. These two-year senate terms are not counted toward the 16-year term limit.)
The short version of the 2014 ballot title claimed that it was “An Amendment Regulating Contributions to Candidates for State or Local Office, Barring Gifts from Lobbyists to Certain State Officials, Providing for Setting Salaries of Certain State Officials, and Setting Term Limits for Members of the General Assembly.” In the even more cluttered 156-word official ballot title, voters were told that the measure would be “establishing term limits for members of the General Assembly.”
Neither of the 2014 ballot titles informed voters that the goal of the politicians was to 1) change existing term limits and 2) change them for the worse—much worse. The buried and evasive wording did succeed in misleading many Arkansas voters. The dishonesty was so glaring that a Democrat Gazette editorial labeled the mendacious amendment “The Outrage of the Year.”
The Arkansas Term Limits web site (ArkansasTermLimits.org) notes that as a result of the deception, “Arkansas now has the weakest term limits in the nation.” If the proposed amendment makes it to the November ballot and is approved by voters, Arkansas would, instead, have the toughest legislative term limits of those 15 states with term-limited legislatures.
The Arkansas Term Limits Amendment would limit representatives to three two-year terms (six years) and senators to two four-year terms (eight years), matching the shortest-in-nation legislative term limits of Michigan. In addition, though, no person would be elected “to any term that, if served, would cause the member to exceed a total of ten (10) years of service in the General Assembly.”
The amendment counts two-year terms and partial terms in this ten-year limit. And it prohibits the General Assembly from sending any further amendment about state legislative term limits to the ballot.