Sec. of State Brewer Certifies Another Initiative for Ballot, Medical Choice Initiative Fails to Meet Minimum Signature Requirement

Brings Overall Total of Four Qualified Measures, Seven More Initiatives to be Verified by Counties

PHOENIX -- Secretary of State Jan Brewer today officially certified Proposition 202, the Stop Illegal Hiring initiative as having met the minimum number of qualified signatures to be placed on the ballot. The Secretary also formally notified the “Medical Choice for Arizona ” Initiative (Prop. 101) that the measure lacks the minimum number of signatures to qualify for the November General Election ballot.

To date, four ballot measures have been qualified to be on the November ballot. They include Prop. 102, the Marriage Amendment; Prop. 200 dealing with Payday Loan proposed reforms; Prop. 202 which proposes to modify laws on illegal hiring of unauthorized illegal aliens; and Prop. 300 which increase Legislative Salaries.

“As Secretary of State, I have a duty to place those initiatives that have submitted the sufficient number of petition signatures onto the ballot as required by law while disqualifying those ballot measures which do not meet that same requirement,” stated Secretary of State Jan Brewer, “While I have no doubt that a lot of hard work has gone into collecting petition signatures, and I want to assure voters that my staff has been extremely diligent in pouring over the over 2.8 million signatures that needed to be checked by my office this year.”

Under the Arizona Revised Statutes in § 19-121, the Secretary of State removes ineligible signatures and invalid petition sheets, and then the county recorders further verify voter registration and petition signatures.

After concluding the entire verification process on Proposition 101, the Secretary of State determined that the Medical Choice for Arizona petition signatures failed to meet the minimum signature requirements for a constitutional amendment of 230,047.

Proposition 202 (Stop Illegal Hiring) officially qualified today and was added to the ballot by Secretary of State Brewer after the number of valid signatures met the minimum signature requirement for a statutory amendment of 153,365 signatures.

There are seven citizen initiatives that are still in the process of having their petition signatures verified by the county recorders. That process is expected to be fully completed before the end of this month.

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