After failing to qualify an initiative for the 2008 ballot, backers of a measure that aims to stop affirmative action in government hiring and contracting decisions are setting their sights on the 2010 election cycle.
Former California Board of Regents member Ward Connerly spearheaded the 2008 attempt to qualify the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative for the ballot. The measure was kept off the ballot after state and county election officials deemed that approximately 6,000 of the initiative’s sample signatures were invalid.
Now, Connerly, a black man who has successfully pushed initiatives in Michigan and California to outlaw racial and gender-based preference policies, is back at it. The Arizona Civil Rights ballot initiative committee this month registered with the Secretary of State’s Office in preparation for a 2010 effort.
Part of Connerly’s persistence stems from the historic election of Barack Obama, who in November became the first black president of the United States. That factor, he said, shreds his opponents’ claims that affirmative-action programs are necessary to counter existing racial prejudice.
“On the policy side, it’s pretty hard to argue that the American society is institutionally racist given the fact you have a self-identified black man as president of the United States,” Connerly said. “A whole bunch of racists must have voted for him, huh?”
Connerly, in the past, has called racial- and gender-based government preference programs “nonsense,” and labeled those who believe the U.S. has not made significant strides in racial relations as “fools.”
And the criticism against Connerly and his efforts has been met with the same vigor. In 2008, opponents hailing from Michigan teamed up with Arizona college students to form By Any Means Necessary, a ballot initiative committee that opposed Connerly’s effort to land the initiative on the ballot.
Several of the group’s 2008 clashes with paid signature-gatherers for the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative were captured on video. On one such video taken on Mill Avenue in Tempe, a man signing a petition was told repeatedly that he is supporting a racist initiative designed to “re-segregate” state universities. The incident lasted for almost two minutes before the man blurted out: “Stop harassing me.”
Another video taken outside Chase Field showed protestors circling around a signature-gatherer and telling passers-by not to sign the petition because it is backed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat, formed a coalition called Protect Arizona’s Freedom to oppose Connerly’s 2008 initiative. Sinema’s group filed a lawsuit in August in hopes of keeping the measure from qualifying for the ballot.
The lawsuit charged that approximately 100,000 submitted signatures were illegally collected or were invalid due to errors on petition signature sheets. At an August press conference, the lawmaker chastised Connerly for using “illegal and deceptive tactics” to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Ultimately, the lawsuit was dismissed after the measure was kept from the ballot by then-Secretary of State Jan Brewer. Maricopa County elections officials found that its share of randomly selected signatures for the initiative had a 43 percent invalidity rate.
Connerly noted several initiatives were prevented from appearing on the ballot for the same reason in 2008, and he said paid circulation efforts for the initiative produced many duplicate and fictitious names.
While Sinema played an active role against the proposal in 2008, she said she is not yet certain if she would lead opposition efforts in 2010.
However, the lawmaker said she still objects to the proposal because it would eliminate government programs aimed at keeping Native Americans in college and women in scientific areas of study.
“He would be eliminating programs at community colleges and universities to help women and students of color succeed and enter the marketplace,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t believe we should have those programs.”
This time, Connerly said the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative Committee will seek access to voter registration files in order to validate signatures prior to filing.
Once an initiative is filed, supporters of the proposal will have to file at least 230,047 valid signatures of Arizona voters by July 1, 2010, in order to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the ballot.