Union Attack on Arizona School Choice Fails Again

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that dooms the Protect Education Act, the latest union-backed ballot initiative to gut the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. Proposition 212 will not appear on the November ballot.

It is the third time in a row Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS) has failed to gather enough valid signatures to attack school choice on the ballot.

Arizona’s universal ESA program serves more than 100,000 students and remains one of the nation’s most successful school-choice policies. Families use the accounts for private school, tutoring, homeschool curricula, special-needs therapies, and other educational needs. Three-quarters of parents of school-age children support it.

The SOS measure would have imposed an income cap that ejected tens of thousands of children, layered on restrictive regulations, and redirected unspent funds away from the students they were meant to serve.

SOS and their union allies had claimed victory when they supposedly turned in more than 420,000 signatures, far more than the 256,000 they needed to get on the ballot. But thanks to the efforts of local pro-school choice groups, SOS’s victory was reduced to ashes.

“Despite spending an unprecedented amount of money in an effort to deceive voters into restricting school choice, the unions could not convince even a small fraction of Arizonans to sign their petition,” said Victor Riches, President and CEO of the Goldwater Institute.  “Instead, they had to resort to unlawfully collecting thousands of signatures to try to game the system and dupe their way onto the ballot.”

The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit against the Protect Education campaign, challenging the validity of its signatures. With help from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Goldwater meticulously documented the deficiencies of the campaign’s signatures. Duplicates alone numbered in the tens of thousands—registered voters may sign only once. Many petition sheets suffered basic defects: missing information, improper addresses, or circulators who failed to register correctly.

One circulator’s petition sheets were invalidated because he made “deliberate material misrepresentations” to voters. He had been caught on video falsely claiming that the ballot initiative would provide scholarships for low-income students to go to college. The same circulator falsely claimed to work for the Arizona secretary of state. It is a criminal offense in Arizona to impersonate a public servant.

Most damning of all, the campaign hired convicted felons to collect signatures in violation of Arizona law. Court filings and reports documented paid circulators with records for manslaughter, kidnapping, human trafficking, arson, and sexual abuse of a minor—including a Level 3 sex offender prohibited from living near schools.

Several circulators had their petition sheets invalidated because they had been convicted of various types of fraud, such as identity theft—yet SOS and their union allies still sent them to ask voters to give them their names and home addresses. These are the same activists who routinely accuse ESA parents of fraud while relying on the worst offenders to game the petition process.

SOS challenged the method for counting valid signatures used in the trial court’s decision in Clark v. Fontes, which left them more than 10,000 signatures short of the ballot threshold. However, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the “trial court applied the correct method” and affirmed its decision.

The lion’s share of credit for this victory belongs to the Goldwater Institute, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, and lead plaintiff Jenny Clark, who spearheaded the Arizona Loves ESAs efforts to block the Protect Education Act campaign from getting enough signatures.

“Tens of thousands of parents and students across Arizona are breathing a sigh of relief today,” said former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who signed legislation in 2022 expanding eligibility for the ESA program to all K–12 students statewide. “Today’s ruling should send a clear message to any other anti-parent, anti-school-choice organization: Arizonans overwhelmingly embrace school choice and will continue to do so, regardless of how many millions of dollars these groups waste trying to take it away.”

Arizonans have made clear they want more options for their children, not fewer. The latest failure by school choice opponents should end the cycle of misleading campaigns that rely on invalid signatures and disqualified circulators.

In Arizona, school choice is here to stay.