Lawsuit: Arizona’s Ranked-Choice Voting Ballot Initiative Is Illegal

A proposed November ballot initiative seeking to implement ranked-choice voting in Arizona violates the state constitution, a lawsuit filed Friday alleges.

Brought by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and three Arizona residents, the legal challenge contests the constitutionality of the Make Elections Fair Arizona Act, a potential ballot measure that would institute an open primary system in which candidates of all parties run in the same primary. The state legislature or other qualified appointees would be tasked with determining how many candidates advance to the general election, which would use ranked-choice voting (RCV) to determine the winner in races with three or more candidates.

The proposal also seeks to largely prohibit the use of taxpayer funds to administer party primaries.

The state of Arizona and Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes are named defendants in the lawsuit, while Make Elections Fair — the measure’s sponsor — is named the “Real Party in Interest.”

Often referred to as “rigged choice voting” by its critics, RCV is a system in which voters rank candidates of all parties in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

Plaintiffs argue the Make Elections Fair Arizona Act violates the state constitution’s “Separate Amendment Rule,” which effectively bars multiple constitutional changes from being packaged into a single amendment proposal. The lawsuit alleges the initiative in its current form “contains twelve different amendments, covering not less than three separate and distinct topics of election law, amending four different sections of the Arizona Constitution, and creating an entirely new section of the Arizona Constitution.”

“Because the Initiative contains distinctly different topics and amends multiple sections of the Arizona Constitution (both expressly and implicitly), the Initiative violates the Separate Amendment Rule,” the suit reads.

Plaintiffs also cited prior statements issued by Make Elections Fair in which “The Initiative’s Drafters Acknowledge[d]” the proposal includes multiple changes to the Arizona Constitution, as alleged in the suit.

“In their rush to undermine the will of Arizona voters for future elections, the special interests that drafted this measure ignored our laws and our Constitution,” Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi said in a statement. “This egregious disregard for law and order exudes arrogance from these parties and should disqualify their measure from the November ballot.”

Plaintiffs requested the Maricopa County Superior Court to declare the proposed initiative violates the Arizona Constitution’s “Separate Amendment Rule” and issue an injunction “prohibiting” Fontes from placing it on the state’s November ballot.