School choice-hating Democrats in Arizona took a massive loss last week after their attempt to place a key issue on the ballot failed.
According to the Daily Caller, Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSA), an organization that advocates for public schools, couldn't manage to muster the proper number of signatures required to get their issue -- putting school choice up for a vote -- on the ballot for the upcoming elections. The group needed 118,823 signatures to make it happen.
Arizona enacted its school choice program earlier this year. The program allows students to receive state funding for schools outside of the public school system, including private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling.
In Arizona, ANY student can now take their share of state government school funding (about $7k) and use it for private school tuition, or even homeschooling.
Dozens of other states passed school choice reforms recently.
Union head @dpwalrod says, that's terrible. We debate: pic.twitter.com/I39Xgzxbty
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) September 30, 2022
The group actually turned in enough signatures to qualify the issue, handing in over 140,000 in total. But so many of them were deemed incomplete and, in some cases, illegitimate that the threshold wasn't met.
SOSA released a statement on the embarrassing development:
"The Secretary of State's office has reviewed the petitions our campaign turned in and has determined we fell short of the minimum signature threshold required to stop universal voucher expansion," the statement read.
It added: "Though our estimated signature count was much higher, the discrepancy was influenced by several factors, including the incredibly high volume of returns of petitions in the final week, days and hours of the campaign."
School choice proponents cheered the news across social media over the weekend.