Jester rejected all 108,837 signatures citing two statutes; the popular-name subsection is not one of them

Protect AR Rights, the sponsor of a proposed amendment to Arkansas's constitution, filed a motion on Monday, Aug. 10, to intervene in a lawsuit challenging Secretary of State Cole Jester's rejection of every signature the group turned in, the Arkansas Times reported. Seven petition signers had sued in the Arkansas Supreme Court five days earlier, on Aug. 5. The underlying case is styled Hanna, et al. v. Jester, CV-26-543.

The defect Jester says is disqualifying is a caption. According to the Times, Jester determined that 19,924 petition pages were headed "The Ballot Measure Rights Amendment of 2026" and that 87 more carried the name of a different measure, "The Educational Rights Amendment of 2026," rather than the popular name Attorney General Tim Griffin's office certified, "The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment." Protect AR Rights submitted 108,837 signatures on the July 3 deadline against a threshold of 90,704 valid signatures. Because no petition part carried the certified language, Jester wrote, the group "submitted zero countable signatures."

What the cited statutes say

Jester's July 30 insufficiency letter, in the passage the Times quoted, rests that conclusion on two provisions: Ark. Code Ann. § 7-9-126(b)(2) and § 7-9-106(a). Read in the version of the code published by FindLaw, neither uses the phrase "popular name." Subsection (b)(2) bars counting a petition part where the petition does not conform to the certified version of the measure. Section 7-9-106(a) is an attachment requirement. The phrase "the lack of the exact popular name or ballot title for a statewide initiative" appears in a different subsection of the same statute, § 7-9-126(b)(7), which the quoted passage of the letter does not invoke.

Two limits on that comparison, stated plainly. Section 7-9-106(a) does reach a petition's "title" - it requires that "a full and correct copy of the title and the measure proposed" be attached - and whether that term takes in the caption printed at the head of a signature page is not settled on this record; no source here construes it. And § 7-9-126(b)(2) turns on § 7-9-107, whose text Daily Pol did not obtain, so what the certified "version of the measure" is held to include is likewise untested here. What the record does establish is narrower and still worth the reader's attention: the passage of the letter that was published cites the two provisions that do not use the words "popular name," and not the one that does.

Four numbers, one pile of paper

The counting is its own dispute. The sponsor's motion says it is "not evident how he arrived at his determination of only 83,211 eligible signatures in his Insufficiency Determination," and puts its own figure at least 93,252 eligible signatures for purposes of the initial count, the Times reported. The Arkansas Advocate, whose report Daily Pol read in the UALR Public Radio republication, describes the signers' complaint as citing 95,111 signatures submitted, a figure no source in this record reconciles with the 108,837 reported elsewhere; they are plausibly different quantities, counted at different stages, but nothing here says so.

The threshold sits between the two contested counts: 83,211 falls short of 90,704, and 93,252 clears it. That gap, not the caption, is what the arithmetic in the filings is fighting over.

The motion came with an affidavit from a canvassing expert, the Times reported, describing more than 7,300 signature culls by the state as erroneous, more than 200 signature pages gone missing without explanation, and an inconsistent application of legal standards in deciding what to count. The same account itemizes the missing material differently: 226 culled petition parts whose scans were not provided to the sponsor, 320 further parts not provided at all, and 199 parts replaced by a mostly blank page marked "CULLED." The Times identifies Chris Galloway, a professional canvasser with the Washington, D.C.-based firm FieldWorks, as having performed a detailed review of the material from Jester's office; it does not state in as many words that Galloway is the affiant. Galloway is quoted saying that a cull eliminated 2,540 parts containing 11,900 signatures for 14 reasons, and that "at least 2,783 of those signatures should not have been eliminated." The Times separately reports that an illegibility standard was used to reject over 3,000 signatures, without expressly attributing that figure to Galloway.

The procedural argument

Protect AR Rights contends in its filing that the evaluation of signatures "consists of two parts" - an initial count, then a verification of signatures - and that the first must be performed before the second, the Times reported. The statute is built that way: § 7-9-126(a) directs the verifying official to perform an initial count and to determine whether the petition holds the required number "on its face and before verification of the signatures of registered voters." The plaintiffs and the sponsor together ask for provisional certification of the amendment for the ballot, a provisional 30-day cure period, and an order requiring Jester to begin verifying signatures.

The sponsor's proposed complaint says Jester's decision to invalidate everything "misinterprets statutes, violates the Arkansas and U.S. Constitutions, and unlawfully fails to count valid signatures," and describes the naming error as unintentional and inadvertent. It also makes a dated point about the certifying office's own web page: as recently as July 3, the complaint says, the secretary of state's link to the group's sample petition read "The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment of 2026," and was changed to the certified name only after the signatures were submitted. The signers' suit makes the same argument, the Times reported, saying Jester's office used the incorrect short title on its website when it published the submitted sheet.

One document in the record cuts the other way, and it belongs in the piece for what it is. The secretary of state's office published an appendix of examples alongside the July 30 letter, headed "The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment Submission," whose section headings include "POTENTIAL SIGNATURE FORGERY EXAMPLES" and "POTENTIALLY ILLEGAL EDITS TO PETITIONER INFORMATION." That is the state characterizing its own examples as potential. It is not a charging document, it identifies no individual in the material Daily Pol reviewed, and no source in this record reports an arrest, a charge or a prosecution arising from it.

What each side says

Griffin's office will represent Jester before the Supreme Court, the Advocate reported, and maintains that the rejection "was proper and in accordance with Arkansas law," according to Griffin spokesperson Jeff LeMaster. Samantha Boyd, a spokesperson for Jester, did not address the lawsuit directly in that report and called Arkansas elections the most "free and fair" in the nation "because we focus on integrity and the rule of law." Gennie Diaz, a spokesperson for Protect AR Rights, said of the intervention: "This is about protecting the voices and constitutional rights of Arkansans who signed this petition and asked for the opportunity to vote."

Analysis, on the facts above. This is the second time in just over two years that backers of a proposed amendment have asked the Arkansas Supreme Court to overturn a secretary of state's rejection of petitions, the Advocate reported, and the last one lost: the court in 2024 upheld then-Secretary of State John Thurston's rejection of abortion-rights petitions. The court is nonpartisan, and Republican-linked justices hold five of its seven seats. So the sponsor is arguing a substantial-compliance theory to a bench that recently declined a comparable one, which is why the procedural claim - that an initial count was collapsed into a verification the statute puts second - may matter more to the outcome than the caption itself.

A prediction this piece can be marked wrong on: the Arkansas Supreme Court will enter an order disposing of Protect AR Rights' motion to intervene in CV-26-543 on or before Sept. 30, 2026. Nothing here is settled - the motion was pending when the reporting was published, and a November ballot leaves the court little room to sit on it.