Smith v. Fontes

The Make Elections Fair Act initiative sought to amend the Arizona Constitution by replacing partisan primaries with an open primary system. Plaintiffs challenged the initiative on multiple grounds, including under a state election statute that outlines the steps a Secretary of State must tale to determine whether an initiative petition has enough valid signatures to appear on the ballot. The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling that this state election statute was unconstitutional under both the Arizona and U.S. constituitions because it forced the Secretary to count some invalid signatures twice, which made it harder for the initiative to qualify for the ballot by unfairly increasing the required number of valid signatures from 15% to 15.2%.