Petitioners seeking a ballot measure to exempt diapers and feminine hygiene products from Arkansas’s state sales tax failed to collect enough signatures, the Fort Smith Times Record reports.
Canvassers were unable to collect the roughly 44,000 signatures – 10 percent of total turnout in the previous gubernatorial election – before Friday’s deadline. It’s not clear why a ballot measure for such a law was needed when Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders – a woman, a mom, and a supposedly free market conservative opposed to taxation of everyday necessities – could just call on the Republican supermajority in the state legislature to pass a bill for her to sign.
Another petition that failed was to strengthen the state’s Freedom of Information Act. That one we can totally understand why Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t want to have to sign that kind of bill.