By Matthew Holloway |

The Protect Education Act is projected to fall more than 10,000 valid signatures short of the number required to qualify for Arizona’s November ballot after a court challenge removed thousands of petition signatures and county recorders completed their validity reviews.

The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) announced Monday that applying the trial court’s rulings and county signature-validity rates leaves the initiative with approximately 245,000 valid signatures. Arizona law required the campaign to produce 255,949 valid signatures.

The calculation follows an expedited ruling Thursday from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David McDowell in Clark v. Fontes, the lawsuit challenging the petitions submitted by Protect Education, Accountability Now, the political committee behind the initiative.

At the time of McDowell’s ruling, the final outcome remained unresolved because Maricopa and Apache counties had not yet completed their reviews. The Arizona Capitol Times reported that the Secretary of State’s initial review had reduced the campaign’s submitted total to 389,376 signatures before the court considered challenges to individual circulators, petition sheets, and duplicate signatures.

McDowell’s ruling left 348,269 signatures presumptively valid before application of the counties’ random-sample validity rates. The court also addressed 24,369 duplicate signatures and challenges involving more than 110 petition circulators.

“The court agrees that it is conceivable that a double count could occur, but the court cannot make a decision based upon a hypothetical double counting of duplicate signatures,” McDowell wrote.

The initiative’s supporters submitted 421,451 signatures on July 2. Save Our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association were among the organizations backing the campaign.

The Goldwater Institute filed its challenge July 20, alleging that tens of thousands of the submitted signatures should be rejected because of duplicate entries, defects in circulator registrations, and petitions collected by people who were legally ineligible to circulate them.

The amended complaint raised more than 73,300 objections. Those included allegations involving unregistered paid circulators, signatures collected before circulator registration, inaccurate addresses or contact information, identification problems, and circulators whose felony convictions or other legal circumstances allegedly made them ineligible.

McDowell ultimately invalidated signatures collected by several circulators. Four circulators were disqualified because of criminal histories. The judge also invalidated several thousand signatures collected by circulator Tyrone Crispell after finding his denial that he misrepresented the initiative to prospective signers was not credible.

AFEC said Monday that nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified through the challenge, including duplicates and signatures gathered by legally ineligible circulators.

“This is a major victory for Arizona parents, students, and the integrity of our elections,” AFEC President Scot Mussi said. “This anti-school choice initiative and its union backers spent more than $7 million dollars trying to dismantle school choice in our state, but they still could not collect enough lawful, valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.”

Campaign-finance figures compiled by Transparency USA from Arizona disclosure records show the Protect Education, Accountability Now committee had reported more than $7.5 million in total expenditures through July 30. The National Education Association accounted for approximately $6.57 million in cash and in-kind contributions, while the Arizona Education Association contributed another $810,000.

The Protect Education Act, designated Proposition 212 during the ballot-review process, would make several changes to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The measure would generally limit eligibility to families earning $150,000 or less, with exceptions including students with disabilities, certain military families, and students assigned to poorly performing public schools.

The proposal would also establish additional requirements for participating private schools and tutors, restrict certain ESA expenditures, and generally require unused annual ESA funds to be returned to the state.

The signature dispute is separate from litigation over how Proposition 212 would be described to voters. Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Julie Ann Mata ordered Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to rewrite portions of the proposition’s descriptive title and “yes” and “no” statements after finding that the existing language omitted significant provisions of the measure. Judge Daniel Martin separately ordered revisions to the Arizona Legislative Council’s publicity-pamphlet analysis.

Matthew Holloway is a senior reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.