PHOENIX — The Arizona Supreme Court won’t order Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to recraft his description of a ballot measure that, if approved, would make some major changes in state election practices.

In a divided opinion Wednesday, Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer said the language prepared by Fontes, which will go on every ballot, “is not false or clearly misleading.” Plus, Timmer said the supporters of Proposition 144 who filed suit are not personally and immediately harmed by the secretary’s decision. 

Not everyone on the high court agreed.

“Petitioners, who are Arizona citizens and voters, have shown a sufficient beneficial interest to establish standing to seek mandamus relief for compliance,” wrote William Montgomery and Kathryn King.

More to the point, they said Fontes was wrong not to mention two provisions of Prop. 144. Those would add language to the state constitution saying only citizens may vote in Arizona elections, and that elections “shall be decided solely by the votes of eligible citizen voters.” Montgomery and King said they would have directed the secretary to recraft what he had written.

The ruling comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a separate legal argument that Prop. 144 should not even be allowed on the ballot at all. The majority rejected arguments by Tempe City Councilman Randy Keating that there are too many unrelated proposed changes in election laws to be given to voters on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

As approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature, Prop. 144 seeks to put several new provisions in the Arizona Constitution.

Aside from the ones about only citizens voting, it would require that those who get their ballots in the mail have the option not just to drop them off at polling places on Election Day — something already in law — but to have the ballots tallied at that time by presenting proof of identification.

That is designed to prevent delays in getting final results.

Part of what provoked the lawsuit was that Fontes said Prop. 144 “may make it harder to challenge election laws.”

Attorneys for the challengers, represented by the conservative organization America First Legal, argued that Fontes was predicting what might — or might not — happen, something they said he is not allowed to do.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Adele Ponce rejected that argument, saying that the secretary is entitled to describe the potential impact of the ballot measure.

“The description can reasonably be regarded as an attempt to provide necessary and appropriate information to the voting public,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court upheld that decision unanimously.

King and Montgomery parted ways with the other justices over Fontes’s failure, in crafting a title for the measure that will appear on the ballot, to mention the two sections of Prop. 144 that would put the citizenship requirement into the state constitution.

Fontes, for his part, said that’s not necessary in the 50 words he’s given to craft a title. He argued that, in a measure with multiple provisions, these were not “principal provisions” that had to be pointed out to voters.

Timmer and the majority did not specifically address that issue. Instead, they concluded that the argument about what’s a “principal provision” is legally irrelevant because the challengers had no right to sue in the first place.

“[The law] leaves to the secretary’s discretion the specific wording used to convey the measure’s principal provisions,” they wrote, with the attorney general given the same discretion to approve or reject the language.