For two decades, the Arkansas Legislature’s gift to the liquor industry, an onerous petition requirement to get the question of going from dry to wet (or vice versa) on a countywide ballot, functioned precisely as designed. It protected that peculiar patchwork of wet and dry counties that funneled the finite number of drinkers to as few retailers as possible.
Originally the signature hurdle was 15 percent of registered voters, as it is with other initiated acts. Then it was raised to 30 percent. And when that threatened to be inadequate to preserve the status quo, lawmakers raised it to 38 percent.
Finally, in 2006, Jim Wilson Jr., a justice of the peace in Marion County, proved that even that mountain could be summited with determination (and, in larger counties, money). Marion went wet, followed by Clark and Boone in 2010; Benton, Madison and Sharp in 2012; and Saline and Columbia in 2014.
Clearly the wall protecting the liquor industry was crumbling at an alarming rate. So in 2015, in an act to “clarify” the law concerning wet-dry petitions, the Legislature sneaked in another highly effective speed bump. Or, as Linda Bowlin, chairman of a committee that tried but failed to get a go-wet question on the ballot in Randolph County, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “We learned the law is fraught with land mines.”
The new law, you see, throws out a whole page of signatures if even one signer on the page is not a registered voter in the county. It happened in Johnson County. In Independence County, the signatures of the mayor of Batesville and the chairman of the chamber of commerce were invalidated that way.
Once again, the Legislature has saved the liquor sellers from the will of the people, but only by interfering with the right of the people to petition the government — a right the state constitution says “shall never be abridged.” Could an appeal on constitutional grounds fail?