Readability is only for citizens, not legislators
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Arkansas legislators during their 2025 session took aim at the initiative and referendum process, making it much harder for citizens to exercise their constitutional rights to propose by petition amendments and other laws in the general election.
After the session Gov. Sarah Sanders bragged that most of the legislative efforts were designed “to end petition fraud and protect the integrity of our elections and our Constitution.”
However, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said the state Administrative Office of the Courts had found only two people convicted of violating laws governing the petition process since 1990 — one in 1992 and the other in 2015 on a municipal petition drive.
Nevertheless, the Legislature passed more than half a dozen laws to fight petition fraud. Five were sponsored by Sen. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, an announced candidate for secretary of state next year. The most obtrusive and hypocritical, though, was sponsored by Rep. Ryan Rose, R-Van Buren. It requires the ballot language for a citizens-sponsored constitutional amendment or initiated act be written at an eighth-grade reading level or below.
Act 602 requires the attorney general to use the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula to measure the reading level of each proposed ballot title. If it’s not at or below the eighth-grade level, the proposal won’t fly.
Already Attorney General Tim Griffin has rejected ballot language for two proposed constitutional amendments, one by the League of Women Voters of Arkansas and the other (rejected twice) by a coalition of nonprofit groups called Protect AR Rights. Both measures are aimed at challenging the legislative obstacles to the petition processes.
The League of Women Voters is suing in federal court to dispute the roadblocks.
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula has its roots in the 1940s, when Rudolf Flesch, a war refugee from Austria who became an American author, invented the Flesch Reading Ease scoring system. His most famous book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do about It,” inspired the phonics system.
In the 1950s The Associated Press used the Flesch formula as part of an effort to make AP writers better. The campaign was successful in convincing most to shorten sentences and avoid using words not commonly understood.
But the Flesch formula, one of many readability measures on the market today, has a built-in flaw. Basically, it counts the number of syllables in each word and the number of words in sentences. It does not determine whether those words and sentences are easily understood.
For example, the phrase “constitutional amendment” used in a sentence could lead to a bad score because it contains eight syllables. Yet that’s sort of necessary to a proposed constitutional amendment and is easily understood.
Flesch-Kincaid then uses the formula to devise a chart showing how difficult a piece of writing is and what level of education would be needed to understand it. The AP wanted its writers to reach an eighth-grade reading level. That’s what Rose chose for his legislation.
In the Flesch formula the higher the score, the easier to read. The maximum possible score would be 121.22, reached only if every sentence consisted of all 1-syllable words. A score between 60-70 would be easily understood by eighth and ninth graders.
I spent a career as an editor trying to make sure newspaper writing was “readable,” and certainly making proposed constitutional amendments and initiated acts understandable is a laudable goal.
But here’s the hypocritical part: Act 602 applies only to citizens’ proposals, not to the three constitutional amendments that can be proposed each session by the Legislature.
I ran Act 602 through a Flesch-Kincaid calculator and found that it scored only 40, which translates to “college level, challenging for most adults.” That might be OK if all legislators read on a college level.
However, the legislation passed the House of Representatives with only 60 votes, low for a Republican effort these days. While 23, mostly Democrats, voted no, another seven did not vote, and 10 (including Northeast Arkansas lawmakers Dwight Tosh, Jimmy Gazaway and Jon Milligan) voted present. Maybe they didn’t understand the bill, or maybe they thought it was wrong-headed but didn’t want to oppose their party line.
All three joined the majority in passing an emergency clause, making the bill effective immediately after the governor’s signature.
The bill passed the Senate more easily 29-5, with one excused. All four NEA senators voted for it.
Let’s say Act 602 had also applied to the legislative proposals. I ran the ballot titles of all three through the formula, and each produced this score: 0 — “very difficult; only for experts.”
Two of the three proposed amendments are pointless, simply putting laws already in effect into Arkansas’ already tedious Constitution. I ran the full text of each through the formula because many voters will want to read and understand that. Here are the results:
• SJR 11, guaranteeing the right to bear arms — score 56, “challenging for 10th to 12th graders.”
• HJR 1018 — prohibiting non-citizens from voting — score 45, “college level, challenging for most adults.”
• SJR 15, creating economic development districts — score 32, “college level, challenging for most adults.”
None would have gotten past the attorney general if Act 602 had been fair. But they will get on our ballots next year anyway.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.