The Arkansas Supreme Court building in Little Rock.
LITTLE ROCK – A lawyer for a Little Rock businessman who hopes to strike a minimum wage increase from next month’s ballot told a special master for the state Supreme Court on Thursday that a “sloppy process” doomed the idea from the start.
David Sterling, representing businessman Jackson T. Stephens Jr., said a proposal to raise the minimum wage from $6.25 to $8.50 per hour by 2017 shouldn’t go before voters. He said the Secretary of State’s office erred when it gave canvassers more time to collect the 62,507 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.
“We have identified what we believe is a very sloppy process,” Sterling told Special Master John B. Robbins, a former state Court of Appeals judge who must submit a report to the high court by noon on Oct. 10. A final set of lawyers’ briefs are due Oct. 16 – four days before early voting opens for the general election.
Democrats are hopeful the minimum-wage issue will attract their party’s voters to the polls as they try to stem a steady wave of Republican gains within Arkansas politics. Stephens, whose father helped found the Stephens Inc. investment firm, is chairman of the board for the conservative Club for Growth.
Robbins opened the hearing Thursday; it could last into next week.
Arkansas’ constitution lets voters petition to place proposed laws and amendments on the general election ballot, provided they obtain enough signatures. For the minimum wage proposal, the target was 8 percent of the number of votes counted in the 2010 gubernatorial election, or 62,507.
When a group of petitioners exceeds the target, it is given 30 days to collect more signatures in case any of the previous set are later ruled invalid.
The secretary of state’s office said the group Give Arkansas a Raise Now, or GARN, turned in 64,113 signatures favoring the minimum wage question and that the group earned a 30-day the right to “cure” any potential shortcomings on its petitions. GARN lawyer David Couch said his group eventually turned in nearly 90,000 signatures.
But Sterling said GARN shouldn’t have had an extra 30 days to gather signatures because many of the 64,113 signatures were on petitions that couldn’t be read by the average person. Copies were either smudged or were in a type face around half the size of 11- or 12-point newspaper type.
“The rules, we believe, are very clear. For a petition to be counted, it has to be legible,” he said. “I don’t think a normal person can read a 6-point font very easily.”
A lawyer for Secretary of State Mark Martin, Martha Adcock, said it was up to Martin’s office to determine whether the petitions are legible and their signatures valid.
“We think the process was fair,” she said.
Stephens is also challenging whether the group met a deadline for submitting petitions. The deadline was to have been July 4, the Independence Day holiday, but Martin’s office used the next business day, Monday, July 7, as the deadline. The minimum-wage petitions were submitted on July 7.
(Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, broadcast or distributed.)
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