The sponsors of an initiative that would ban illegal immigrants over the age of 14 from receiving public benefits and services has failed to qualify for the ballot in Arkansas. A similar petition was circulated but failed to qualify for the 2008 ballot in Arkansas.
Under Arkansas law, if an initiative petition presents the required number of raw signatures at the time of the deadline, but signature verification reveals that some are invalid, proponents have an additional 30 days to try to gather enough signatures to meet the requirement. However, according to the secretary of state's office, the petition submitted last week was about 10,000 signatures short of the raw number required before signature verification even began, so the extra 30 days does not go into effect and the measure fails to qualify.
