By admin 
PHOENIX (AZFamily) — It appears Arizona voters will not decide on any school voucher reforms in November.
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Weeks after a Valley judge blocked a GOP-backed measure, the Arizona Supreme Court issued a mixed decision Tuesday, sending the case regarding Proposition 212, also known as the Protect Education Act, back to a trial court to count the signatures.
The proposal would have banned Arizona families that make more than $150,000 a year from participating in the program and returned any unused money in an ESA account to public schools.
The biggest issue was the way duplicate signatures were being treated. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected supporters of Prop. 212’s argument that they were punished twice for double signatures, saying the secretary of state’s validity rate was applied once and did not add a second layer of duplicate punishment.
The court also said proposition supporters could not find an example of signatures subtracted twice.
The Supreme Court ruling does not kick the proposition off the ballot but sends it back to the trial court to determine whether the petition contains at least 255,949 valid signatures.
In early July, Prop 212 supporters said they had more than 400,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot.
But with Tuesday’s ruling, school and education advocates are admitting defeat and saying the Protect Education Act will not qualify for the November ballot.
Arizona’s largest teachers union criticized the ruling as overturning the will of Arizona voters.
“Prop 212 would have protected students and returned money to our underfunded public schools. Arizona educators will dedicate the next 11 weeks to supporting our pro-education candidates so that they can undo the harm that’s been done to our schools,” Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said in an emailed statement.
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“This does not reflect what Arizona voters want. It does not reflect the overwhelming support of educators, parents and public school advocates across the state who volunteered their time and demanded a voice in reforming a program that abused taxpayer money and pulled funding from their neighborhood public schools. Instead, the hard-earned resources educators raised to fund this were buried under a mountain of big money, political power, and a system that consistently sides with special interests,” a spokesperson for Protect Education said in an email.
Opponents of the voucher reform measure praised the decision.
“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,” Victor Riches, president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute, said in an email. “Instead, they had to resort to unlawfully collecting thousands of signatures to try to game the system and dupe their way onto the ballot.”
Also in the ruling, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to disqualify signature sheets where a signature gatherer listed a mailing address for a place she did not live.
The court also overturned a trial court’s decision to throw out entire signature sheets over signers’ names or addresses that had someone else’s handwriting. The Supreme Court said that was too harsh and said only the individual bad signature line should be voided and restored some signatures.
Late last month, a Maricopa County judge ruled Republican-backed Proposition 145 could not be on the ballot because the proposal’s vague wording would invalidate future legislation and it violated the state’s single-subject rule.
Prop. 145 would have banned the state from taking back ESA funds from military families. The measure also included a provision that would block any future bill or ballot measure from changing those protections.
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