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Halter says enough signatures collected to put lottery on ballot Wednesday, May 14, 2008 By John Lyon Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Lt. Gov. Bill Halter said Tuesday he has collected more than enough signatures to place his proposed constitutional amendment to create a state lottery on the November ballot. A conservative group opposed to Halter's proposal said it has not ruled out filing a legal challenge to the measure. At a news conference on the Capitol steps, Halter said the Hope for Arkansas campaign has surpassed the 77,468 signatures needed to place the lottery proposal on the November general election ballot. The campaign will continue gathering signatures and hopes to collect 100,000 before the July 7 deadline, he said. Halter has said the lottery would raise about $100 million per year to fund college scholarships. "This is, I believe, a wonderful opportunity for Arkansas to not only advance our achievement in higher education, to address the fact that we are 49th in the percentage of our adult population that has a higher education degree, but also, and importantly, it is an opportunity for our state, through an advancement in higher education, to move up the income ranks nationally," Halter said. Halter asked Kendra Bean, a 19-year-old freshman at Pulaski Technical College, to sign the "symbolic 77,468th signature" for the measure. Bean and several other college students spoke in support of the lottery proposal, as did Alan Hughes, president of the Arkansas AFL-CIO. Jerry Cox, executive director of the Family Council, said after Halter's news conference that the proposed amendment is "fatally flawed" because it does not define a lottery. Most people who signed Halter's petition probably did not read the measure, he said. "We're going to do everything we can to defeat this proposal, and if a legal challenge is appropriate, then we will certainly do that," Cox said. John Thomas, a Family Council spokesman, said U.S. Census Bureau statistics suggest that Georgia's education scholarship, on which Halter's proposal is based, has not made a significant difference in the percentage of people in that state holding college degrees. Between 1990 and 2006, the percentage of Arkansas residents with a college degree rose 5 percent, Thomas said. During the same period, the percentage of residents with college degrees in Georgia, which passed a state lottery in 1992, rose 7 percent, he said. "It just generally goes up year after year, just because that's the nature of that particular statistic," Thomas said. Hope for Arkansas spokesman Bud Jackson accused the Family Council of choosing its statistics selectively. The success of Georgia's lottery, which has allowed more than a million students to attend college, is well documented, he said. "Jerry Cox and his organization have time and again offered up cherry-picked facts that distort reality in order to promote their own special interests," Jackson said. "The bottom line is, there can be no argument for stating that more scholarship money available for Arkansas students won't afford more of our own state's students the opportunity to achieve a higher education and a better quality of life." For Halter's proposal to get on the ballot, the secretary of state must verify that at least 77,468 of the signatures he submits are valid signatures of registered Arkansas voters. Also, signatures must come from at least 15 of the state's 75 counties, and from each of those 15 counties Halter must have a number of signatures equal to 5 percent of the votes cast in that county in the last gubernatorial election. "We're well on our way to doing that," Halter said of the 15-county requirement. |
