PHOENIX — The organizer of a recall drive against Gov. Doug Ducey says he did not have the 376,604 valid signatures on petitions needed by Friday’s deadline to force a special election.
So how many signatures did Leonard Clark and his allies get?
He’s not saying. But Clark conceded that with no money and no real organization, there weren’t that many.
And with failure on the horizon, Clark said he didn’t even reach out to circulators to turn in their petitions.
The 52-year-old Clark, a regular fixture at the Capitol who testifies on many bills, had hoped to use public dissatisfaction with Ducey on two key issues to fuel recall efforts.
One was the governor’s decision to sign two measures designed to make it harder for Arizonans to propose and enact their own laws.
One replaces the current standard that petition drives need be only in “substantial compliance” with the law to appear on the ballot, replacing it with a “strict compliance” standard. The other eliminates the ability of groups seeking to create laws to pay petition circulators by the number of signatures they collect.
“I can put up with a lot of things,” Clark said Friday. But he said he drew the line “when you take away (and) pretty much make it impossible to have initiatives by regular citizens that don’t have a lot of money.”
On his petitions, Clark also mentioned Ducey’s signature on legislation to remove all restrictions on who can qualify for a voucher of state dollars to send a child to private or parochial school. He said the governor “twisted the Legislature into passing a theocratic measure which would use our public tax dollars to indoctrinate favored religions into school children.”
