Attorney General Leslie Rutledge today rejected a proposed ballot initiative from David Couch to raise the minimum wage again, this time to $11. Voters previously raised the state’s minimum wage via a ballot initiative in 2014, bumping it from $6.25 to $8.50

As readers of this blog have grown accustomed to, a protracted back-and-forth to win approval form the attorney general for ballot measures has been typical. This particular rejection, however, is outrageous: The language in the proposed ballot initiative is identical to the language in the previous minimum wage initiative, which was not only approved by the previous attorney general, but ratified overwhelmingly by voters!

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Couch, a Little Rock attorney who has worked on a number of successful ballot initiatives, said he was shocked by Rutledge’s opinion. “She rejected the same ballot title that was approved last time,” said Couch, who worked on that campaign. “It was approved by 66 percent of the voters in 2014.”

Here is Couch’s proposal:

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Popular Name
An Act to Increase the Arkansas Minimum Wage

Ballot Title
An Act to amend the Arkansas Code concerning the State minimum wage; the Act would raise the current State minimum wage from eight dollars and fifty cents ($8.50) per hour to nine dollars and twenty-five cents ($9.25) per hour on January 1, 2019, to ten dollars ($10.00) per hour on January 1, 2020, and to eleven dollars ($11.00) per hour on January 1, 2021.

The only differences between that proposal and the successful 2014 proposal are the dates and dollar amounts.

Under the circumstances, Rutledge has to jump through some hoops to come up with nits to picks. She argues that “a bare and general reference to the increase of the ‘State minimum wage’ may lead to confusion amongst the voters.” Apparently voters have gotten dumber in the last four years. Indeed, to bother typing out these flimsy obstructions masquerading as concern for voters, Rutledge must think we’re dummies.

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She goes on to argue that references to “’employers’ and ’employees’ in the context of raising the minimum wage [are] technical terms, and as such voters should not have to guess as to their meanings.”

Now, we could pretend that Rutledge has a grave concern that the ballot initiative walks through every exception and technicality to the state minimum wage law in Title 11, Chapter 4, Subchapter 2 of the Arkansas Code. But let’s not go through the looking glass. This is foot-dragging on an initiative she would rather not see on the ballot. If Couch answers her objections, she’ll come up with something else. You might call that an abuse of her power.

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Couch said he planned to try again and re-submit tomorrow.

To proceed, the ballot measure first needs to be certified by the attorney general. At that point, the amendment would need to collect around 85,000 signatures of registered voters by July to make it on the ballot in November.

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Thus far this year, Rutledge has rejected more than 50 proposed ballot titles and not accepted a single one.

In addition to this proposal, Couch also recently submitted a separate proposed ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage up to $12 (following the same graduated increase as the $11 proposal, but going up another dollar in 2022). It would also provide a “local option” to “allow counties, cities, and towns in the state to adopt and enforce a higher local minimum wage.” Couch said that he is still communicating with allies to decide whether to attempt to proceed with the $11 wage-hike proposal or the $12 proposal with the local option for higher. 

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