Page:Leigh v. Hall.pdf/8

A.] by the petitioners that several petitions were not filed and it was asked that they be allowed to file them in support of their original petition. This was denied. Several days later another group of citizens asked leave to file supplemental petitions which the county court denied. This court, on reviewing the proceedings of the lower court, reversed the action of the county court saying of the petitions: "The fact that there were many of them, and that they were filed on different times, did not change their prayer or lessen the number of petitioners. The filing of the remonstrance made no such change, nor did it cut off the right of the petition. They were in effect only one petition and were evidently intended to be used as one."

To the same effect is Reeves v. Smith, 190 Ark. 213, 78 S.W.2d 72, decided under the present Initiative and Referendum Amendment, where we said: "Amendment No. 7 to the Constitution of the State is the Initiative and Referendum Amendment, and provides, among other things, that the petition for an act to be initiated by the people may be circulated and presented in parts, but each part of any petition shall have attached thereto the affidavit of the persons circulating the same, etc. This means necessarily, that the 'parts' constitute but one petition for any proposed act filed with the county clerk, who shall pass upon the sufficiency of the petition."

Thus it can be seen that there is a definite thread running through our cases which says that all petitions in initiated measures should be counted as one petition even though filed on different dates. The only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the above citations is that the filing on June 27 and the filing on July 7 were but one petition.

The remaining problem then is, what is the proper date to consider the filing of the petition (since all parts are one); should it be June 27 or July 7? In considering this the following rules must be taken into account. This court is definitely committed to the proposition that Amendment Seven should be liberally construed to