People who solicited signatures for petitions on a proposal to limit attorneys' fees and damages in medical lawsuits failed to follow state laws for canvassing, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by opponents of the measure.
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The lawsuit calls into question thousands of signatures that were used to get the proposal on the Nov. 8 general election ballot. The lawsuit also challenges the ballot title -- the abbreviated description of the proposal that would appear on ballots. The suit is the second legal challenge filed this week against proposed amendments.
The Committee to Protect AR Families, one of two groups formed to oppose the medical "tort reform" amendment to the state constitution, filed its lawsuit Thursday with the Arkansas Supreme Court. The group seeks to have the proposal, known as Issue 4, stripped from the ballot.
Secretary of State Mark Martin -- whose office approved the petitions' signatures -- is the sole defendant in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs include the committee and its directors, Martha Deaver and Adam Jegley, as well as retired Col. Mike Ross, former Circuit Judge Marion Humphrey and resident James Brooks.
The lawsuit argues that at least 8,138 of the nearly 93,000 signatures approved by Martin's office are not valid because they were collected improperly by paid and volunteer signature-gatherers. Violations were found on thousands of signature pages listed in an exhibit to the lawsuit, which called into question as many as 35,000 signatures.
Among the problems found in 40 pages of collected signatures attached as examples in the suit were signatures missing required personal information such as street addresses and pages that had signatures from multiple counties. Each petition page must have signatures from the same county under state law.
Others showed signatures collected and dated after the page had been notarized or before the canvasser submitted required information -- including a background check -- to the secretary of state's office.
Deducting the signatures, if they are determined to be improper, would leave the proposal's supporters without enough qualifying signatures. A proposed amendment requires 84,859 valid signatures to get on the 2016 ballot.
The "tort reform" proposal is supported by Health Care Access for Arkansans -- a group of physicians, pharmacists, nursing-home owners and other medical care providers -- that paid for the hiring of canvassers. In a statement Thursday, its director, Chase Dugger, asserted that the group did not break any rules when collecting signatures.
"This is the second desperate attempt in a week to stop Arkansas voters from having a voice in getting this inflation of health-care costs under control," Dugger said. "Much like the lawsuits they file against doctors and hospitals, these lawyers sue on every issue they can think of."
The Arkansas Bar Association, which has also formed a committee against the measure, filed a separate suit Monday alleging that the ballot title would be misleading to voters. Both suits seek an order against counting votes for the amendment if there is not enough time to remove it from the November ballot.
The proposal would amend the Arkansas Constitution to limit attorneys' fees to a third of damages in lawsuits against medical care providers, and would require the Legislature to set a cap for non-monetary damages that would be at least $250,000. The amendment also would give the Legislature some power in defining how periodic payments are calculated.
As with the earlier lawsuit filed by the bar association, the lawsuit filed Thursday argued that the wording of the ballot title insufficiently describes the law's impact on a jury's authority to set awards for damages such as pain and suffering.
The extra step taken in challenging the thousands of pages of signatures collected was one considered by the bar association, which eventually decided that it would be too costly and time-consuming, Scott Trotter, an attorney for the group, said at a Monday news conference.
Jordan Johnson, a spokesman for the Committee to Protect AR Families, said the group filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to gain access to the signature documents from the secretary of state's office, and conducted an investigation with multiple people reviewing the thousands of files.
Among the findings of that investigation, according to the suit, is that several of the canvassers hired to collect signatures were not certified through an Arkansas State Police background check as required by Arkansas Code Annotated 7-9-601. However, the lawsuit did not name individual canvassers or show in exhibits that they had not passed background checks.
A spokesman with the secretary of state's office said he would check to see if all the canvassers had submitted background checks.
According to expenditure reports filed with the Arkansas Ethics Commission, the Health Care Access committee supporting Issue 4 hired 3.0 LLC, a Colorado firm, to hire signature-gatherers. The company does not have a listed telephone number.
The Committee to Protect AR Families reported $420,430 in contributions during its first month of fundraising in July, all of which came from private attorneys and law firms. Fairness for Arkansans, the committee created earlier this month by the bar association, has yet to file its first financial statements.
Johnson said that while both groups are opposing the plan to limit damages and attorneys' fees, they have not collaborated on the lawsuits filed this week.
Health Care Access for Arkansans reported $870,710 in donations during May, June and July, more than half of which came from the state's largest group, representing nursing homes.
A Section on 09/02/2016