Ballot-spot petitioners jump in ’14

Saturday, February 15, 2014

The Arkansas secretary of state’s office received 92 petitions from money-saving judicial and prosecuting attorney candidates across the state, more than double the 39 petitions filed in 2012, an office spokesman said Friday.

The secretary of state’s elections division has combed through those petitions and certified 89 of the candidates, who now won’t have to shell out for the filing fees that others pay. Avoiding those fees is part of the reason many candidates knock on doors and collect up to 10,000 signatures, but it doesn’t explain the increase in candidates opting for the grass-roots approach this election year over last.

Alex Reed, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said Friday that one of the contributing factors to the high numbers is an election-law change made in 2013.

Lawmakers eliminated the role that the Democratic and Republican parties play in nominating candidates for prosecutor.

“Prosecuting attorneys are now part of the nonpartisan filing through the state this year instead of through the parties,” he said. “I think that’s part of the reason for the increase. For some candidates, they may not have needed that many signatures to file by petition, so it just might have made more sense to do that than to pay the filing fee.”

“For others, say they didn’t have an opponent for a few years and they went out and gathered petitions. Then if they have an opponent in the future, they’d have that base [of supporters.] It’s a strategy, too, I think,” he said.

Of the 90 candidates who met their petition requirements, only 15 were prosecuting-attorney candidates taking advantage of the new system and the ability to bypass the filing fee.

Seventy-five candidates for circuit court, appeals court and district court also filed petitions. In comparison, there were 35 candidates for judge positions on ballots in Arkansas in 2012 and 34 candidates in 2010.

Most of the races on the ballot for 2014 are for circuit-court seats, and they were last up for election in 2008, when 129 judge candidates appeared on the ballot across the state. Reed said the fact that there are more judgeships on the ballot in 2014 than in 2012 could explain some of the increase in petitions as well.

Terms for judges vary - eight years for Supreme Court, six years for the court of appeals, six years for circuit courts, and four years for district courts.

A majority of all the state’s judicial seats will be on the ballot in 2014.

In 2008 - the last time a majority of the judges faced the voters - there were 129 nonpartisan candidates for judge on ballots across Arkansas and almost three times as many races as in 2010 and 2012. Reed did not know how many candidates filed for office by petition in 2008.

This year, no candidates for the three Arkansas Supreme Court races decided to file for office using the petition method, which requires at least 10,000 valid signatures. Justice Jo Hart, elected in 2012, was the last Supreme Court candidate to do so.

She said at the time that she wanted to run a grassroots campaign because she was worried about spending in judicial elections eroding “the public’s confidence in the impartiality and integrity of our judges.”

Of the 75 judge petitions approved for the May 20 election, 70 were for circuit-court positions, three were for district courts and two were for the court of appeals.

Candidates for circuit court and the Court of Appeals must turn in 2,000 signatures or 3 percent of the number of qualified voters within their districts, whichever is less. District-court candidates must turn in 2,000 signatures or 1 percent of the number of qualified voters within their districts, whichever is less.

For the circuit-court petitioners this year, the number of required signatures varied from 148 signatures for the District 11-East 1st Division seat to 1,914 signatures, which was the case for several races.

Both candidates for the court of appeals had to turn in 2,000 signatures. And in the district-court races, the number of required signatures were 164 for two races and 33 for the Scott County 15th District race.

Two people failed to qualify for the ballot after submitting an insufficient number of signatures.

Both of those candidates can file for office by paying the filing fee during the regular candidate filing period - Feb. 24 through March 3 - when other judge and prosecuting attorney candidates will file for office. Those fees, mandated by Arkansas law, are equal to a percentage of the office’s annual salary: 3 percent for district judges (salary varies by district), 4 percent for circuit judges($5,559), 5 percent for court of appeals judges ($7,177), and 6 percent for the Supreme Court ($8,886 for justices and $9,600 for the chief justice).

Candidates for prosecuting attorney who choose to pay filing fees will find that the rates have fallen now that political parties are no longer involved.

The Republicans and Democrats both charged $7,500 for prosecuting attorney candidates to file for office in 2010. This year, the fee equals 3 percent of the position’s annual salary ($3,061 to $3,658).

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/15/2014