A court-appointed special master report revealed on Tuesday that roughly 99 percent of challenged signatures collected for a pro-ranked-choice voting Arizona ballot measure are duplicates.
In his report, court-ordered Special Master and retired Arizona Superior Court Judge Christopher Skelly disclosed that 37,657 pairs of signatures gathered in support of Proposition 140 are, in fact, duplicates. As argued by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AZFEC), this discovery “now place[s] Proposition 140 thousands of signatures under the constitutionally required signature threshold to qualify for the [November] ballot.”
Proposition 140 would amend the Arizona Constitution by instituting an open primary system in which candidates of all parties run in the same primary. It also paves the way for the state to potentially adopt ranked-choice voting (RCV) for general elections.
Under an RCV system, voters are asked to rank candidates of all parties in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
As described by AZ Free News, Skelly’s report noted how “hundreds of the alleged duplicates were overruled and removed from consideration and 3,333 were removed from consideration by agreement of attorneys on both sides,” and that “[w]hile the signatures were classed into ‘exact matches’ and ‘near matches,’ Skelly [wrote] that he was instructed to ‘not read anything into those descriptions and … did not.’”
