ARKANSAS

'We won’t be intimidated': Activists balk after right-wingers publish AR canvasser list

Tess Vrbin, Arkansas Advocate
June 9, 2024 

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Supporters of a proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment that would allow a limited right to abortion denounced a conservative advocacy group’s publication of a list of paid canvassers, calling the move an intimidation tactic.

The right-wing Family Council posted Thursday on its website a list of 79 people that the Arkansans for Limited Government ballot question committee is paying to collect signatures from across the state. The committee needs 90,704 signatures from registered voters by July 5 for the proposed amendment to appear on the November ballot.

The Family Council obtained the list of paid canvassers and their home cities via an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request, according to the post. Ballot question committees do not have to submit lists of unpaid or volunteer canvassers to the state.

AFLG released a statement Friday in response to the post.

“The canvassers working tirelessly to collect petitions in support of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment are proud of the work they are doing to promote reproductive liberty in the state and to engage in direct democracy — they aren’t hiding,” the group stated. “But when the Family Council releases lists of their names and whereabouts to their network of anti-choice protestors who vehemently, and sometimes violently, disagree with our work, it puts our team at great risk for harassment, stalking, and other dangers. The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated.”

Other states’ ballot successes provide model for Arkansas abortion initiative

The Family Council’s post is the second instance of alleged intimidation of abortion amendment supporters in less than two weeks.

On May 30, canvasser Veronica McClane filmed an interaction between herself and Little Rock police, in which Officer Christopher Tollette told her that both Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission did not want her and others canvassing at the intersection of 9th and State streets.

Tollette told McClane that canvassers could be arrested for obstructing traffic. The canvassers told reporters they were not blocking traffic but instead sought the attention of drivers from a public sidewalk. The Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, located at the 9th and Broadway intersection, attracted a slow-moving line of cars with a free food giveaway on May 30.

Mark Edwards, the Little Rock Police Department’s spokesman, told reporters that Sanders had nothing to do with the officers’ presence and that Tollette misspoke when he mentioned her.

Edwards also said the police arrived because a Martin Luther King Jr. Commission member claimed to have overheard a canvasser trying to coerce someone into signing the petition.

The proposed amendment

The Arkansas Abortion Amendment would not allow government entities to “prohibit, penalize, delay or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization.” The proposal would also permit abortion services in cases of rape, incest, a fatal fetal anomaly or to “protect the pregnant female’s life or physical health,” and it would nullify any of the state’s existing “provisions of the Constitution, statutes and common law” that conflict with it.

The Family Council claims this measure would allow “thousands of elective abortions in Arkansas every year” and “permit abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in many cases” because of its health provisions despite the 18-week limit.

The proposed amendment would alter Amendment 68 to the state Constitution, which currently states that Arkansas policy “is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the Federal Constitution,” by adding “and the Constitution of the State of Arkansas” at the end.

Arkansas Legislature saw wide range of maternal and reproductive health legislation in 2023

Amendment 68 states, “No public funds will be used to pay for any abortion, except to save the mother’s life.” The proposed amendment would not alter this statement, contrary to the Family Council’s claim in Thursday’s post.

Abortion has been illegal in Arkansas, with a narrow exception to save the pregnant person’s life, since June 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion a federally recognized right.

Democratic state lawmakers introduced bills during the 2023 legislative session that would have created exceptions to the abortion ban for fatal fetal anomalies, child victims of incest and threats to the health of the pregnant person. Republican lawmakers voted down all three proposals in committee.

The anti-abortion Arkansas Right to Life has been leading a “Decline to Sign” campaign encouraging voters not to sign petitions for the amendment. McClane said last week that opponents of the proposed amendment have attended AFLG’s signing events in protest, which she said amounts to harassment.

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