Arizona teachers union accused of using felons to gather signatures for anti-school choice ballot initiative

A teachers union and its allies are attempting to undermine one of the nation's top school choice programs through a deceptive ballot initiative, according to a legal challenge. However, their reliance on felons convicted of heinous crimes—including manslaughter, kidnapping, human trafficking, and sexual abuse of a minor—to gather signatures may prove to be their undoing.

"This is a shameless attack on Arizona's parents, funded by an out-of-state union," said Victor Riches, president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute, which is challenging the union's initiative in court. "They're trying to game the system by turning in tens of thousands of invalid signatures in an effort to destroy the most successful school choice program in the country. This won't happen on our watch."

The Initiative and Its Claims

The Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona announced late last month that they had submitted roughly 415,000 signatures for the so-called Protect Education Act—a ballot initiative that would impose numerous restrictions on Arizona's popular education savings account program. These restrictions include removing at least 20,000 of the more than 100,000 K–12 students currently served by the program.

Organizers framed the submission as a decisive win. It isn't.

Signature Verification Challenges

While the number of signatures submitted clears the 255,949 required for a ballot initiative, clearing the legal minimum and surviving the verification process are two very different things.

School choice opponents would need a 62% signature validity rate. The national average rate is in the mid-to-high 70s. However, Arizona's review process is unusually exacting: a missing date, an illegible address, or a petition sheet separated from its accompanying text can void every signature on the page.

The Goldwater Institute's complaint meticulously challenges the validity of more than half of the union-backed initiative's signatures. If their challenges succeed, the union could be left with fewer than 200,000 signatures—considerably below the ballot threshold.

Specific Allegations of Invalid Signatures

According to Goldwater, most of the Protect Education Campaign's signatures are invalid due to a variety of legal defects:

• Many signatures were not from registered voters.
• Others are invalid because the signature gatherer failed to fill out the initiative paperwork properly, such as listing a false address, failing to provide an ID, or failing to notarize the document.
• Tens of thousands are duplicates. Registered voters are only allowed to sign the petition once.
• Still more are invalid because the circulator made "deliberate material misrepresentations" to voters, including a circulator caught on video falsely claiming to work for the Arizona secretary of state. It is a criminal offense in Arizona to impersonate a public servant.

Criminal Convictions Among Petition Circulators

Most shockingly, tens of thousands of signatures are invalid because the paid petition circulator was convicted of a felony or crimes involving fraud, forgery, or identity theft.

Goldwater's complaint details how petition circulators paid by the union-backed campaign were previously convicted of crimes including:

• Manslaughter
• Attempted murder
• Kidnapping
• Transportation of illegal immigrants for profit
• Arson
• Stalking
• Burglary
• Carjacking
• Assault with a deadly weapon
• Welfare fraud
• Credit card forgery
• Perjury
• Selling or producing cocaine and methamphetamines

In one case, the petition circulator hired by the union-backed campaign was a level 3 sex offender—the highest level in Arizona, reserved for those "with a high risk of another sex crime." Although he was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and is prohibited from living near a school, he posted a photo related to his work on the campaign.