The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that a law which criminalized per-signature payments to petitioners is constitutional.
The unanimous decision overturns a lower ruling and says that the 2017 law does not violate the First Amendment rights of petition circulators.
Justice Clint Bolick wrote that the statute only forbids per-signature compensation, leaving productivity-based compensation intact. He added that the law was not vague.
In 2020, the group Petition Partners was charged with 50 misdemeanor counts for a bonus program that paid people for each signature collected for a proposition.
The ruling sends the case back to trial court with the framework the justices provided.
