Friday, May 29, 2009
Anti-affirmative action advocate renews ballot drive
Arizona Capitol Times: 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.”
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. 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.
Comments
