Four days into early voting and less than two weeks before the general election, Arkansas' ballot changed.
Or, more precisely, the votes that will be count changed.
The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday invalidated enough of the signatures on petitions for the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act to knock the issue off the ballot.
That is, of course, literally impossible. Ballots were prepared long ago. Election machines were programmed with the act, which is Issue 7, on the ballot. And more than 144,000 Arkansans had reportedly cast votes by the time the court issued its ruling.
What the justices really did was to order that none of the votes cast for or against Issue 7 be counted, making this the third statewide ballot issue this year to be invalidated by the court.
The others were Issues 4 and 5, both of which were tossed because of inadequate ballot titles.
Notably, signatures gathered for each of them, too, were challenged in court; but the Supreme Court on Thursday declared those challenges moot.
The reason given was that the issues -- Issue 4 to cap noneconomic damages and attorneys' fees in medical lawsuits and Issue 5 to permit casino gambling in three Arkansas counties -- were already gone from the ballot.
That means the only surviving ballot question that is going to the people as a result of a petition drive is Issue 6, a proposed constitutional amendment to allow medical marijuana.
One in four initiatives survived the process.
Forget for a minute how you might stand on these specific proposals. The initiative process is there to allow the people to take issues to the ballot.
If three out of four attempts this year weren't valid, should we take a closer look at the process?
These petition drives, regardless of the issue, involve a lot of work and money. Some proposed changes, as with Issue 7 this year, have been tried in multiple elections.
In fact, some of the same citizens who brought Issue 7 this year tried a similar proposal in 2014 that came surprisingly close to passage. That year, medical marijuana didn't get kicked off the ballot and drew better than 48.5 percent of the general election vote.
This year, Issue 7, the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act, found itself in competition with Issue 6, the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016.
The process began long before they were tagged as Issues 6 and 7, when different groups of petitioners first sought ballot title approval from the state's attorney general and began the process of collecting the required number of signatures.
The number differs for an initiated act and for a constitutional amendment, but the target audience is the same qualified electors, or registered voters.
Both groups of petitioners thought they had succeeded in collecting the necessary signatures when the Arkansas secretary of state certified their respective issues to the ballot.
Then came the court challenges to ballot titles or signatures or both. The petitioners and the state officials who approved the ballot titles and certified the petitions all got called to task in the court cases.
But it is the Arkansas Supreme Court that ultimately determined voters do not get to answer three out of four citizen-initiated ballot questions this year.
In a concurring opinion invalidating Issue 7 signatures last week, one of the justices suggested the state's canvassing requirements are "unduly difficult" to follow.
Requirements are set out in a 2013 law that the justice said "imposes a chilling effect on the rights of our citizens to initiate laws."
That is a legitimate concern. We need to keep open the citizens' avenue to change the law or the state Constitution.
But court review of these issues, regardless of the grounds on which ballot issues are challenged, is also a healthy part of the process. It just ought to come earlier -- before voting begins.
Commentary on 10/30/2016