A Democratic campaign to ask voters to enshrine the right to vote by mail into the Arizona Constitution has failed to gather enough signatures to make it on the November ballot.

The political action committee behind the campaign, Protect the Vote Arizona, announced a day before the deadline that its 2,000 volunteers had gathered 439,000 signatures, not enough to withstand inevitable challenges to and disqualifications of thousands of those signatures.

Spokeswoman Stacy Pearson said the campaign would instead focus on a legal challenge to the Republican ballot referral that Protect the Vote Arizona was created to compete with in November.

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With a requirement to gather 383,923 valid voter signatures before the July 2 deadline, Protect the Vote Arizona’s Free, Fair and Secure Elections Act faced an uphill battle since volunteers began collecting signatures in the spring. The ballot initiative was filed with the secretary of state in March and had only gathered 50,000 signatures as of May 6.

“Facing an impossible 88 percent validity requirement, the campaign made a strategic decision to not turn over the signatures of hundreds of thousands of mail-in voting supporters to the very election-denying politicians (i.e. Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap) that this measure was designed to protect against,” Stacy Pearson, spokeswoman for the campaign, said in a statement.

Citizens initiatives typically try to gather 25% more signatures than necessary, to account for signatures that are disqualified.

State Representative Alexander Kolodin, who authored the Republican ballot referral that the Protect the Vote campaign was designed to challenge, celebrated its failure in a social media post.

“It isn’t November yet but I just beat Democrat Adrian Fontes at the ballot box!” Kolodin wrote.

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Kolodin is running in the Republican primary for secretary of state, in hopes of facing incumbent Fontes, one of many Democrats who backed the Protect the Vote Arizona initiative, in November.

In the post, Kolodin called the failed initiative the “California-Style Elections Act” and asked readers to donate to his campaign.

“Adrian Fontes’ radical California-style ballot proposition would have made our elections even more lawless and chaotic,” Kolodin said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror. “I’m pleased to see that voters rejected it just as they will reject Mr. Fontes in November.”

Kolodin’s ballot referral would prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence elections, require every voter to show government identification before casting a ballot in every election and require all polling locations to provide on-site tabulation of ballots for voters who want it.

Voters who cast a ballot in person are already required to present ID, but those who vote by mail use signature verification to confirm their identities. When Democratic lawmakers questioned how Arizonans who vote by mail would produce ID, as required in House Concurrent Resolution 2001, its Republican supporters brushed that concern aside.

Republicans repeatedly said that HCR 2001, dubbed the “Fast Accurate Secure Transparent Election Results Act,” would not impact vote by mail, despite concerns from county recorders, elections officials and Democrats.

Kolodin has been trying to pass similar legislation, based on Florida’s voting practices, for two years. The final, pared down version of his House Concurrent Resolution 2001 was passed via a final party-line vote during the marathon last day of this year’s legislative session, which began in the late morning of June 12 and lasted until 4:45 a.m. the next day.

According to Kolodin, HCR2001 is intended to restore trust in the state’s elections and to speed up results, both stated concerns of Republicans who made baseless claims that the 2020 and 2022 elections were stolen.

Pearson said in the statement that Protect the Vote Arizona “remains committed to disqualifying the Arizona legislature’s democracy-eroding referral (HCR2001) in court, and ultimately electing a slate of pro-democracy candidates in November.”

HCR2001 is one of five controversial last-minute ballot referrals that the Republicans who control the Arizona Legislature sent to voters that are now facing legal challenges to keep them off the ballot.

Randy Keating, a member of the Tempe City Council, filed the challenge to Kolodin’s elections overhaul, arguing that it violates the state’s single-subject rule because it addresses multiple election processes.

“While it is disappointing that the Protect the Vote initiative will not be submitting signatures for ballot consideration, the issue of protecting vote-by-mail remains top of mind for Arizonans,” Patti O’Neil, chairwoman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party said in a statement. “More than 85% of voters, regardless of party, use vote-by-mail and have done so for the past 30 years.”

No-excuse mail-in voting was enacted by Arizona Republicans in 1991.