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Over the past several weeks, three initiatives proposed for Arizona's November ballot have been rejected due to insufficient signatures. Two other initiatives were approved for the general election even though they might have fewer than the number of signatures required by law.

That's five of the nine initiatives proposed for the ballot that have run into hurdles because of questions over signatures submitted by supporters. In the three cases where the initiatives were rejected by Secretary of State Jan Brewer, the measures' supporters have launched legal challenges to get their proposals on the ballot.

These court skirmishes are a symptom of a larger problem: Arizona's initiative process has become messy and needs to be reformed.

Initiatives are a way for regular people to create laws they believe would benefit the state. However, the little guy is increasingly left out of the picture as more and more initiatives are supported by special interests who are able to pay people to gather signatures for them.

For example, this year state Rep. Marian McClure, R-Tucson, tried to get an initiative called Stop Payday Loans on the ballot. The measure would have effectively killed the payday-loan industry in Arizona.

McClure's grass-roots effort, however, didn't come close to collecting the 153,365 valid signatures needed by July 3. When she threw in the towel in June, McClure said she and her supporters had collected only 30,000 signatures.

The payday-loan industry, conversely, had no such trouble.

With money pouring in from out of state to pay for petition circulators, the industry was easily able to put its own initiative — dubiously called the Payday Loan Reform Act — on the November ballot.

While the measure would enact some welcome changes on such loans, it would also guarantee that payday lenders could operate in the state indefinitely by voiding the 2010 expiration date in the state's payday-lending law.

As we see it, there are two big problems with the initiative process:

● Paid petition circulators.

● The deadline for filing initiative petitions.

The increasing use of paid circulators could be behind the many invalid signatures Brewer has cited in rejecting three initiatives.

Joseph Kanefield, election director in the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, said Brewer has been calling for several years for Arizona to outlaw paying petition circulators for each signature they collect.

"She believes that paying by the signature invites fraud, errors and provides an incentive for fraud," Kanefield said. "We certainly believe some of the incredibly high error rates we are seeing this election cycle is a direct result of this practice."

Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services reported last week that Brewer said there was a 42 percent error rate in signatures submitted by the T.I.M.E. Coalition, a group pushing for a 1-cent hike in the state sales tax to pay for transportation infrastructure.

Brewer said T.I.M.E. signatures had "the largest overall invalid rate that we've seen in Arizona."

Paid circulators also appear to get most of their signatures in the state's largest cities and ignore rural areas.

The T.I.M.E. initiative, for example, submitted petitions with about 260,000 names, but based on the number of random signatures that county recorders were asked to verify, about 87 percent of the names came from Maricopa County.

We don't believe any county should almost singlehandedly decide if initiatives make it to the ballot.

All Arizonans get the chance to vote on the measures, of course, but we believe true grass-roots efforts would gather signatures from all corners of the state, making the process more representative.

Meanwhile, lawmakers should seriously consider giving voters another chance to change the deadline for filing initiative petitions.

The deadline, which is set in the state Constitution to "not less than four months preceding the date of the election," often doesn't give county recorders enough time to verify that petition signatures are valid.

The deadline is the reason two measures — one that outlaws new taxes on home or real-estate transactions; and one to require that builders give a 10-year warranty on new homes — will be on the ballot even though they might have fewer valid signatures than mandated by law.

Following a legal precedent, the state allows initiatives projected to have 95 percent of the required valid signatures to be put on the ballot if it deems that county recorders don't have enough time to check and verify all signatures before an election.

The Legislature in 2004 gave the public a chance to alter the Constitution and make the filing deadline seven months prior to the election. However, voters soundly rejected that initiative by a better than 2:1 ratio. With this year's initiative mess, we believe the Legislature should give voters another chance to move the deadline.

The initiative process has been around since statehood. We certainly don't want to get rid of it, but it might be time to give it a fine tuning so that it serves Arizonans as intended.