Arkansas legislators heard reports today of dirty tricks, intimidation, assault and possibly even arson during the 2022 battle over a Pope County casino.
And some lawmakers are seizing on the wild stories as a new excuse to restrict citizens’ rights to put issues on the ballot, or to do away with the ballot initiative process entirely.
Legislators on the Joint Performance Review committee met Thursday to drill down on reports of misdeeds on both sides from groups who clashed over an effort to roll back legal authority to create a casino in Pope County. At the end, lawmakers voted to ask the Arkansas State Police, the state Board of Election Commissioners, the state attorney general and local prosecutors to look into the whole messy ordeal.
The fisticuffs began when a group called Fair Play for Arkansas was collecting signatures in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to put a measure on the ballot to take Pope County off a list of four counties cleared for casinos by Amendment 100, passed by Arkansas voters in 2018. The three other casinos — in Hot Springs, Pine Bluff and West Memphis — are up and running, but the Pope County project remains tied up in court.
The Arkansas Tourism Alliance, headed up by well-known politicos David Couch and Dustin McDaniel and funded by the Cherokee Nation interests that won the profitable license to operate the Pope County casino, fought Fair Play’s efforts. Fair Play was funded largely by the Oklahoma-based Choctaw Nation, a Cherokee rival who applied for but did not win the Pope County casino license. The Choctaw Nation operates multiple casinos in Oklahoma and stands to profit by knocking out the competition.
“Our canvassers faced assault, physical intimidation, harassment and other threats against their efforts to legally gather signatures,” Fair Play for Arkansas member and Pope County resident Hans Stiritz said. He said counter-canvassers paid by the Arkansas Tourism Alliance went well beyond arguing with signature collectors in parking lots. One canvasser got punched in the face, and another’s house was burned down, he said. (A Russellville prosecutor and two arson experts at the state police looked into the house fire in question and determined arson was not likely.)
Tom Pollard of Blitz canvassing, the company Fair Play for Arkansas hired to oversee the signature collection efforts, said he’s worked in 20 states on multiple campaigns and has never experienced opposition like that from the Arkansas Tourism Alliance.
“We’ve been blocked in many states,” he said, explaining that blockers are workers paid to interfere with signature collectors by standing nearby and pressuring people to not sign. But during the Pope County effort, Pollard said teams of blockers would show up to yell obscenities. Sometimes they would go into a store and complain that the canvasser was harassing customers so the store manager would kick the canvasser out. Pollard said blockers would follow canvassers home and tell them they’d quit their jobs if they knew what’s good for them. One employee of Fair Play for Arkansas got run off the road, he said.
Lobbyist John Burris, hired by Fair Play for Arkansas, told the lawmakers that the Arkansas Tourism Alliance blockers approached multiple Fair Play canvassers with cash offers to get them to throw their collected signatures in the trash and not collect any more.
“We have multiple recordings of their agents presenting our canvassers cash money and payment to throw away signatures and stop gathering,” Burris said. He said he has no way of knowing how many signatures were thrown out. But he said the opposition was successful in starting a bidding war. Some Fair Play for Arkansas canvassers began threatening to not turn in the signatures they collected unless Fair Play ponied up more money than what the Arkansas Tourism Alliance was offering.
There were no laws at the time preventing the cutthroat strategy of paying canvassers to dump their clipboards and come work for the other side, according to Rep. Carlton Wing (R-North Little Rock), a sponsor of a bill passed by the legislature this spring that makes it illegal to dump signatures.
“At this point it was legal to do this … but it is highly unethical,” he said. The new law fixes the problem, Wing said.
Burris also complained to lawmakers about the Arkansas Tourism Alliance’s payment of $650,000 to a California resident named Mark Jacobyto keep him from coming to work for Fair Play for Arkansas. Jacoby runs a successful but controversial signature-gathering company, and Couch said he paid Jacoby simply to get him to agree to not work for the opposition.
Burris said Jacoby had been convicted of falsifying his own voter registration and hinted that Jacoby might have been the mastermind behind the bully tactics the Arkansas Tourism Alliance allegedly put to use.
“You should not be able to hire criminals to run opposition efforts against Arkansas citizens seeking to access their ballots through legal means,” Burris said.
Dustin McDaniel, a former state attorney general who worked with the Arkansas Tourism Alliance, pledged that he did not direct any employees of the group to break any laws. He said his group was not the reason Fair Play for Arkansas failed to get on the ballot. McDaniel said Fair Play’s signature collectors were bumbling and misrepresented what their campaign aimed to do, and that their shoddy paperwork rendered many of their signatures invalid.
McDaniel also said at least two of the people hired by Fair Play for Arkansas seemed to live out of state and one of them has an extensive criminal record.
Rep. Jim Wooten (R-Beebe), an opponent of casinos generally, was put out by the back-and-forth accusations of wrongdoing between the Pope County players. He said it’s ridiculous that lawmakers were being drawn into it.
But other lawmakers wanted to dive deeper into the mix. Conservative lawmakers have long worked to curtail citizens’ rights to change laws through the petition process, and some of them took the opportunity Thursday to use this Pope County casino dust-up as an example of why we should do away with the option entirely.
Sen. Alan Clark (R-Lonsdale) said the whole process is a joke, but he knows voters would fight hard to keep it. “The citizens’ right to amend anything is a farce. But how much will you people spend if we try to end it?” he said.
McDaniel said he agrees the process to amend the Arkansas Constitution is “far less than perfect,” but said the ever-growing mountain of laws and procedures that make the process so expensive is to blame. “We’ve made it so burdensome to get anything on that ballot that the only one who can do it now is someone who can finance it,” he said.
Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Knoxville) said that if he was writing an article about Thursday’s meeting, “I would write ‘JPR review committee shows what a complete cluster expletive this ballot process is,’” he said. “This is not democracy. This sounds like Gestapo-style brownshirts running around harassing each other. It’s insane. I think we need to do even more to stop these ballot questions.”
Both sides appeared to be “hiring criminals” in Pope County, Pilkington said. “I want you guys to understand what a complete catastrophe this is. It’s causing massive issues. What we’ve essentially done is put our constitution up for sale.”
McDaniel offered an alternative fix. Corporate donations to ballot initiatives aren’t capped by law in Arkansas, he said. You could fix this with the stroke of a pen, he told legislators.
David Couch, a veteran of the petition process who was behind the 2016 amendment that legalized medical marijuana in Arkansas, fielded questions from lawmakers about how the Arkansas Tourism Alliance paid the canvassers from the other side whom they convinced to stop collecting signatures. Couch said his group did surveil the Fair Play for Arkansas office to see how many canvassers they were sending out, but he said no one from the Arkansas Tourism Alliance staked out Burris’s house, as Burris had claimed.
Couch acknowledged that if the only story you hear about ballot initiatives is the one regarding a casino in Pope County in 2022, it might seem wacky. But Couch said his group operated lawfully.
“This is pure democracy. This is America,” he said.
Kristin Foster, who worked for the Arkansas Tourism Alliance as a blocker and offered canvassers from Fair Play for Arkansas money to stop working, took the hot seat as the final person to testify Thursday. Lawmakers were eager to ask her about the transcript of a recorded conversation that caught Foster offering $1,000 that day, plus $700 a week going forward, if a rival canvasser would agree to not collect any more signatures.
Foster said she did not pay anyone to destroy signatures they’d already collected, only to agree to not collect any more.