More than 95,000 Arkansans signed a petition this spring. They signed it at churches, and at the No Kings march in Little Rock. They were asking for one thing: the right to keep putting measures on their own ballot.

The state of Arkansas counted zero of those signatures.

Not "some were bad." Not "you came up short." Zero. Secretary of State Cole Jester sent Protect AR Rights a letter on July 30 saying that all 19,924 petition pages they turned in had the wrong name printed across the top, so under state law, "you have submitted zero countable signatures."

The name the attorney general approved was "The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment." The name on the sheets left off a word and added a year. That was enough to erase every signature on every page.

Here's what makes it sting: Arkansas requires 90,704 valid signatures to put an amendment on the ballot. Protect AR Rights turned in 95,111. They cleared the bar. Nobody ever checked whether the signatures were real, because a heading disqualified all of them before the counting started.

And that's before you get to what happened to the individual signatures.

They culled a man's signature for being illegible. It's the one on his driver's license.

Arkansas Times reporter Matt Campbell pulled the 19,000+ pages from Jester's own office and went looking for his name. He found it on page 12,759 — flagged as illegible.

It's the same signature he's used for more than 20 years. The same one on his Arkansas driver's license. The same one on his voter registration form. His printed name sat right next to it, perfectly readable, with his correct birthdate and address. Flagged anyway. The signature directly above his, which he says is harder to read than his own, sailed through.

He wasn't alone. A law professor in Fayetteville. A Democratic congressional candidate. A newly elected county prosecutor. A former state senator. A newspaper reporter. All flagged. Meanwhile a signature reading just "Madison," with no last name at all, was fine.

Then there are the four people who signed with an X — voters who, because of age or disability, had a canvasser fill out the rest of the form for them. Arkansas law explicitly allows this, as long as the canvasser initials the sheet. Every one of those was thrown out too.

How does the state decide? Under oath in federal court this July, Leslie Bellamy, the secretary of state's own director of elections, explained how her office catches two entries supposedly written in the same handwriting:

"We literally are having to eyeball that."

That's the process. Temporary employees, eyeballing it, deciding whose voice counts.

Every lever that did this belongs to Sarah Sanders

Here's the part that doesn't make the headlines. Sarah Sanders didn't personally cull anyone's signature. She didn't have to. She built the machine and she hired the operator.

She signed the laws. In the 2025 legislative session, Sanders signed a package of bills rewriting how Arkansans petition their own government. Her office announced the signings in batches that spring — one, then another. Lawmakers attached emergency clauses so each took effect immediately:

• Act 218 — canvassers must announce that petition fraud is a crime before anyone signs.
• Act 240 — canvassers must view a photo ID first.
• Act 274 — the signer has to read the ballot title in front of the canvasser.
• Act 241 — canvassers must file a sworn affidavit before any signature counts.
• Act 273 — the Secretary of State can disqualify signatures if he decides a canvasser broke a rule.

Read that last one again, then look at what happened in July. Jester used exactly that power, writing that the petition "contains evidence of such laws being violated."

She picked the man holding the scissors. Cole Jester isn't a career elections official. He graduated from law school in 2022, clerked for six months, then spent two years as deputy chief attorney in Sanders' own governor's office. That's the whole résumé. Sanders appointed him Secretary of State in December 2024, describing him this way:

"If my team ever needs someone to do a deep dive on the law, prep for a court hearing, or craft a brilliant defense of conservative legal philosophy, one of the first people I always ask is Cole Jester."

Her lawyer now decides which Arkansans' signatures are real. A month after taking office, he held a Capitol press conference backing the very package of petition restrictions he would later use.

She picked judges on the court that hears the appeal. That same December announcement named Cody Hiland and Nicholas Bronni to the Arkansas Supreme Court — Hiland having already served, in Sanders' words, his "first 18 months on the Supreme Court." On August 6, seven Arkansans sued in that court, arguing the name change caused no "material confusion" and that Jester's decision "stifled Petitioners' voices."

They also point to a bipartisan law passed in 2025 that says the Secretary of State cannot rule signatures insufficient over a "failure of form." A heading printed across the top of a page is about as pure a question of form as there is.

"We're asking the Arkansas Supreme Court to let the voters decide this ballot measure, not Secretary Jester," said their attorney, Alexander Jones.

Arkansas' Supreme Court is officially nonpartisan. Republican-linked justices hold five of its seven seats.

A federal judge already called most of it unconstitutional

On July 1, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks issued a 62-page order striking down a stack of these laws as First Amendment violations — the photo ID requirement, the read-the-ballot-title requirement, the fraud-is-a-crime script, the affidavit rule, and a requirement that sponsors hand the state the home addresses of every paid canvasser.

That last one matters because those lists are public records. In 2024, an opposing group published the personal information of people gathering abortion-rights signatures. Brooks was blunt:

"Doxxing is a 21st Century heckler's veto, and the government should take care not to aid it. Arkansas has taken no such care here."

He was blunter about the fraud excuse. The state's own election director had testified that fraudulent signatures referred to their legal team were never actually pursued.

"Despite Defendant's hand wringing about fraud, the State of Arkansas remains stubbornly disinterested in investigating and prosecuting wrongdoers, instead opting to heap additional burdens on the sponsors and canvassers who do comply with the law."

A federal judge is saying the quiet part out loud: this was never about fraud. If it were, they'd prosecute fraud.

Instead, Jester's office hired a "petition fraud investigator" — a state employee named Patrick Hall who isn't a law enforcement officer and has no authority to arrest anyone. In February he showed up at a Unitarian Universalist church in Little Rock and asked canvassers to see their IDs.

Arkansas didn't invent that move. In 2024, Ron DeSantis sent state police to the homes of Floridians who had signed an abortion-rights petition, and defended it as making sure the vote was fair. Treating ordinary voters as suspects is a habit down there — Florida's attorney general at the time, Ashley Moody, once asked the FBI to investigate people who helped Floridians pay off court fines so they could register.

What Arkansans actually lose

Direct democracy is how Arkansas raised its own minimum wage over the business lobby's objection. It's how Arkansas got medical marijuana over the objection of the people running the state. It is, literally, the tool voters use when the legislature won't listen.

That's why it's being dismantled. The Fairness Project counts more than 200 bills attacking the ballot measure process nationwide since 2025 — and more than 65 in a single month at the start of 2026.

It doesn't have to go this way. In Missouri this month, voters were handed a constitutional amendment written to let any one congressional district veto a citizen-led initiative. They buried it 80% to 20%, and it lost in all eight districts. Missourians got to vote on it. Arkansans never did — their signatures were thrown out before the question could reach a ballot.

This is the third warning on our own about page: they come for your freedom to vote, your freedom to choose your politicians, and your freedom to make change. Arkansas is running all three at once.

The tell

Sanders' pattern here is not subtle. When her own Republican legislature killed her $750 million mega-prison, she recruited primary challengers against the Republicans who stopped her — and lost all three races. When people tell her no, she goes looking for a different door.

And when someone does the job the way she wants it done, she says so out loud. Jester isn't even running to keep the office; he's running for land commissioner in November. Sanders gave him her full endorsement:

"Cole Jester did a fantastic job as my legal counsel, and he has been America's best secretary of state."

America's best secretary of state, in the same year his office threw out 95,111 signatures over a heading and flagged a reporter's driver's-license signature as unreadable.

Sarah Sanders is on the ballot this November. Jester's name will be there too, on a different line. The rest of it — the acts, the appointments, the eyeballing — was never put to a vote at all.

Source

Elizabeth L. Cline, "The ballot initiative process is rigged. Do liberals see that now?", Arkansas Times, August 18, 2026. Photo: Arkansas Times.