When a coalition of voting rights activists in Ohio set out last December to introduce a new ballot initiative to expand voting access, they hardly anticipated that the thing to stop them would be a matter of word choice.

But that’s what Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost took issue with when he reviewed the proposal’s summary language and title, then called “Secure and Fair Elections.” Among other issues, Yost said the title “does not fairly or truthfully summarize or describe the actual content of the proposed amendment.” 

So the group tried again, this time naming their measure “The Ohio Voters Bill of Rights.” Again, Yost rejected them, for the same issue, with the same explanation. After that, activists sued to try and certify their proposal—the first step on the long road toward putting the measure in front of voters on the ballot. 

“AG Yost doesn’t have the authority to comment on our proposed title, let alone the authority to reject our petition altogether based on the title alone,” the group said in a statement announcing their plans to mount a legal challenge. “The latest rejection of our proposed ballot summary from AG Yost’s office is nothing but a shameful abuse of power to stymie the right of Ohio citizens to propose amendments to the Ohio Constitution.”

These Ohio advocates aren’t alone in their struggle to actually use the levers of direct democracy. Already in 2024, several citizen-led attempts to put issues directly to voters are hitting bureaucratic roadblocks early on in the process at the hands of state officials. 

Arkansas organizers have been stonewalled by their attorney general, who has rejected language for ballot proposals to expand medical marijuana and increase government transparency. In Nebraska, a lawmaker behind a law sending more public money to private schools has leaned on the secretary of state to block a ballot referendum attempting to repeal it. 

Abortion rights measures have been under particular scrutiny. Missourians attempting to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution were delayed from gathering signatures for months as state officials fought over the specifics of the ballot measure. Advocates in Montana are still fighting to get their proposal for abortion rights approved for signature gathering after the state’s attorney general rejected it in January. Meanwhile, observers across the South are waiting with bated breath for the Florida Supreme Court to decide the fate of a proposed abortion rights initiative, which could decide whether abortion remains legally available in the region; Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody asked the court to block the proposal, saying that the language is too confusing for voters to understand. 

Ostensibly, these proposals are being rejected over technicalities; a problem with a ballot title, or unclear language in the proposal. But in practice, advocates argue, the state officials reviewing these proposals are blurring the lines between procedural and political. They claim these officials are overstepping the bounds of their discretion to reject ballot initiatives based on their opposition to the underlying issue and not the quality of the petition.

“We have never seen the Ohio AG try to broaden their authority to allow them to determine whether a title is permissible,” explained Emma Olson Sharkey, an attorney specializing in ballot initiatives at Elias Law Group, one of the firms leading the suit against Yost, the Ohio attorney general. “This is clearly, from my perspective, an overreach of authority, and we are seeing similar efforts with conservative officials across the country.” 

National observers say this is an escalation of an ongoing effort by leaders of mostly conservative state governments to thwart direct democracy. Bureaucratic backlash to citizen-led ballot initiatives has become a pattern in some red states. Arkansas’ Republican-run legislature last year pushed through new rules raising the signature-gathering requirements, just a few years after voters rejected those same changes. Last August, Ohio voters similarly rejected a proposal put forth by state Republicans to increase the threshold needed for measures to pass.

“It’s all part of this larger puzzle of who gets a say and who gets to participate in our democracy, and where things are popular among constituents but that does not align with whoever is in political power in that state,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which tracks ballot measures around the country.

A rejection from a state official doesn’t necessarily spell certain death for a citizen-led initiative, because organizers typically have opportunities to correct problems and resubmit. But advocates for direct democracy say the long delays caused by fighting with an attorney general over the language of a ballot proposal wastes legal resources and precious time needed to collect signatures and connect with voters. In this way, even if state officials can’t kill proposals outright, then perhaps by a thousand cuts.

In the just over half of states that allow for citizen-led ballot initiatives or referendums, each one has different rules governing the process. In Michigan, a proposal is submitted to the secretary of state before signature gathering, and language is reviewed by the state Board of Canvassers. Illinois has next to no pre-approval process at all for a petition to make it onto the ballot. In Florida, by contrast, ballot title and summary language must be approved by the secretary of state, the attorney general and the state supreme court. 

In evaluating these petitions for inclusion on the ballot, these state officials are typically empowered to conduct a review of the petition’s formatting, language, and adherence to state and federal laws. This may mean an attorney general or lieutenant governor making sure that a petition only applies to one subject, or that the language of a summary is easy to understand. These officials don’t have the authority to review the underlying issue a petition is about. And yet, in recent years, some of them seem to be pushing the boundaries of their clerical duties. 

“It really should be more mechanical power to certify this and neutrally evaluate it,” explained Quinn Yeargain, a professor of state constitutional law at Widener University and frequent Bolts contributor. “They’re putting a thumb on the scale and pushing, I think, to expand the understanding of their power.”

David Couch, an Arkansas attorney who has spearheaded various ballot proposals for years, claims the state’s attorney tried to undercut organizers’ attempts to increase government transparency by repeatedly rejecting their proposed language for ballot measures. Couch worked with a coalition called Arkansas Citizens for Transparency last year to introduce a pair of initiatives aimed at amending the state constitution and creating a new state law to guarantee the right to access public information. The ballot initiatives were first submitted to Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin in November of last year, but he rejected one of them, on the grounds that the popular name and ballot title, “The Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment,” was not sufficiently specific.

The group resubmitted the amendment in December, offering four different options for ballot titles and other changes to the text, but the proposal was again rejected. They made a third submission in January, but before Griffin could issue a decision, Couch sued the attorney general in state court over the previous rejections. 

“In my opinion, he was using his statutory authority, which is very limited, to make us rewrite the amendment and rewrite the act to weaken it, and to make it be more what he would like it to be rather than what we the people would want it to be,” Couch told Bolts.

Griffin has maintained that his rejections remained within his authority, and stated in his first opinion from December that his “decision to certify or reject a popular name and ballot title is unrelated to my view of the proposed measure’s merits.” Even so, later on in the opinion, Griffin wrote that he took issue with the word “transparency” in the ballot title, saying it had “partisan coloring” and “seems more designed to persuade than inform.” 

Griffin eventually accepted both proposals, though not before one more rejection, and Couch dropped the lawsuit—not because he had a change of heart, he says, but because the coalition had already lost too much signature-gathering time. Organizers now have until July 5 to gather 90,000 signatures from voters in at least 15 counties to get the issue on the November ballot. (That threshold would be even higher under the bill Arkansas passed last year, but it’s currently held up by a different lawsuit heading toward the high court.)

“They use it to run the clock up. You lose a month every time you have to change something,” Couch said. “What he did was just wrong. It’s unconstitutional.” 

In Missouri, abortion rights organizers have engaged in a nearly year-long battle with the state over a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and override the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

After the group, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, submitted 11 different options for an amendment proposal back in March, there was a protracted legal fight with Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican. Bailey tried to force a fiscal impact statement onto the measure claiming it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars (the state auditor, who is tasked with such assessments, had initially determined the state would see “no costs or savings”). 

Once the state supreme court rejected the attorney general’s attempts to inflate the cost of the amendment, the proposal moved on to Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who was tasked with writing 100-word summaries of each option submitted. Organizers accused him of using misleading and partisan language to describe six of the proposals, and the courts ultimately agreed with them after they sued; in an Oct. 31 ruling, a state appeals court said that Ashcroft’s ballot summaries were “replete with politically partisan language,” and ordered him to use the more neutral summaries written by a lower court. Ashcroft tried to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, but they refused to take up the case. 

Once the dust settled from all this legal back and forth, by the time Missourians for Constitutional Freedom embarked on their formal signature-gathering campaign, it was already January, eleven months since they first submitted their proposal. They now have until May 5 to gather more than 170,000 signatures to get it on the November ballot. One observer with experience running petition campaigns described the experience to The Missouri Independent as “going downhill at a very fast rate of speed.” 

In Montana, a group backing a similar abortion rights measure, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, is still stuck in limbo. After state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, a Republican, rejected their measure for not adhering to the single-issue rule, the group quickly petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to overturn the decision, claiming that Knusden overstepped his bounds. They have some precedent on their side—the supreme court in November reversed a similar decision from the attorney general, after he invalidated a ballot measure to reform election rules to create a top-four primary. 

“We were prepared for the fact that it was likely [Knudsen] would try to block the ballot measure and try and take up more time,” said Martha Fuller, president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, one of the groups in/leading the coalition. But Fuller says they’re not letting this delay kill their organizing momentum. 

“I feel really confident in our ability to gather the number of signatures even on a tighter time frame than we are now,” she said. “Every day we’re hearing from folks who are ready to go; we’re already feeling a sense of momentum building around this measure.”

As organizers fight to get their initiatives on the ballot, they also face broader conflicts around citizen-led ballot measures. Lawmakers around the country have continued to tinker with rules governing nearly every step of ballot initiative processes. While voters in Ohio and Arkansas have rejected state attempts to move the goalposts for ballot initiatives, in others states officials have forced those changes; an analysis by Ballotpedia of legislative changes made to the initiative and referendum process between 2018 and 2023 found that roughly 20 percent of all the legislation passed made the processes more difficult.

And the changes keep coming: Just last week, Republicans in the Missouri legislature advanced two different bills that would make it harder for initiatives to pass. One passed by the Senate would require that a proposal receive majority support in five of the state’s eight congressional districts to pass, in addition to a simple majority of voters statewide. The other, which just passed in the House, would add stricter requirements for the signature gathering process. 

“There’s a constant pushback from conservatives to try to stop these measures in their tracks,” said Olson Sharkey from Elias Law Group. “Because they know, especially with reproductive rights, if these measures get on the ballot, they’re going to win” 

Olson Sharkey sees these tactics coming out of conservatives’ playbook, but conservatives aren’t the only ones deploying them. As Bolts has reported, the Democratic city government of Atlanta changed the rules for popular initiatives in an effort to block a proposed referendum against the ‘Cop City’ police training center; the city council earlier this month went as far as to approve the controversial practice of signature matching to disqualify some people who signed the petition. 

For Fields Figueredo, who tracks ballot initiatives across the country, no matter who’s responsible, chipping away at ballot initiatives betrays a disregard for the fundamental principles of democracy.

“It’s ultimately about minority rule,” she said. “We could elect people in a democratic process, and also they are not actually listening to the will of the people.” 

The post Red State AGs Keep Trying to Kill Ballot Measures by a Thousand Cuts appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s been clear for more than a decade that Ohioans have wanted to regulate cannabis for adults,” Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told Bolts. “This should be a wake-up call.”

Issue 2 is set to go into effect Dec. 7, with the first round of new business licenses to be announced by September. But the law comes with a crucial asterisk: it changes state statute, not the state constitution, so its approval at the ballot is essentially tantamount to Ohio voters passing a new piece of legislation just like Ohio lawmakers do. This means that those lawmakers can change the law back without voter consent. There is no limit on the extent to which the GOP-controlled state legislature can amend the 41-page initiative voters just supported; they could even outright repeal it. 

Governor Mike DeWine and his fellow Republicans who run the legislature have stopped short of calling for total repeal, but even before Election Day, they had signaled their intent to make the law more restrictive if it passed. Now that it has, they’ve indicated they could make some changes as soon as in the next few weeks, ahead of the Dec. 7 effective date, while others may be a bit longer in the offing. 

Fox is incredulous that these lawmakers would cross the electorate by messing much with a law 57 percent of voters just approved. “It would be political malpractice,” Fox said. “That being said, they don’t always do right by their constituents.”

Ohioans need look no further than another ballot measure that just passed—Issue 1, enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution—to see that their legislature is comfortable upending voter will: House Republicans on Friday issued a news release claiming that Issue 1 doesn’t actually affect the state’s existing abortion ban, and they vowed to continue enforcing abortion criminalization, in defiance of election results. These lawmakers even said that they would “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary” over the amendment—an extraordinary prospect. “No amendment can overturn the God-given rights with which we were born,” Republican state Representative Beth Lear said in that release.

These rapid threats come after Ohio Republicans earlier this year tried to torpedo the abortion measure by rushing a separate ballot measure to raise the threshold for passage of constitutional amendments from 50 to 60 percent. Ohioans rejected the measure in August, and Bolts reported at the time that these events were part of a long series of maneuvers by the Ohio GOP to undermine direct democracy. 

Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the Drug Policy Alliance, now worries that cannabis regulation ushered in by Issue 2 could similarly be distorted by politicians. “I think there’s going to be this real disconnect with particularly GOP legislators wanting to overturn the will of the voters and make this, potentially, something that actually does the opposite of what the voters intended in trying to address some of the harms of the drug war, and may be used as a vehicle to double down on some of those harms,” she told Bolts.

GOP leaders of both Ohio legislative chambers have already confirmed they’ll consider reversing aspects of Issue 2 that sought to unwind drug-war policies, which have produced vastly disproportionate enforcement of marijuana laws against Black people in the state. 

Issue 2 contains no provisions to automatically expunge the records of Ohioans who already have criminal convictions over marijuana. Other states have passed such a reform after legalization, but for now Ohio lawmakers seem more likely to loosen the measure’s other equity provisions than to strengthen them.

Senate President Matt Huffman has said that he takes issue with the amount of tax revenue that will be dedicated to promoting cannabis business opportunities for those most personally affected by prohibition. 

As it stands, Issue 2 calls for a 10 percent tax on marijuana sales, with a plurality of the proceeds going toward a program meant to provide financial assistance and license application support to prospective cannabis business owners who demonstrate “both social and economic disadvantage” resulting from the historically racist and classist enforcement of marijuana laws. That includes people and family members of people who “have been arrested for, convicted of, or adjudicated delinquent for a marijuana-related offense,” the law states.

Instead, some Republican leaders have signaled they want the tax money to serve very different purposes. Speaker Jason Stephens told local media that the legislature should allocate tax revenue from cannabis sales to fund jail construction and law enforcement training.

His remarks have alarmed people who worked to pass Issue 2 in Ohio, who say that a main reason they sought the initiative was to reduce incarceration and criminalization stemming from drug charges. FBI data show Ohio has arrested at least 5,700 people in each of the past three years for selling or possessing marijuana, and Black Ohioans have long been targeted at much higher rates than their white peers, despite comparable rates of marijuana usage.

Fox saw this up close when he was arrested multiple times in Ohio for possession of marijuana. These charges, he said, hampered his ability to take out student loans and to find housing and employment. But Fox, who is white, said he got off relatively easy: “I would go to court and have the exact same charge and criminal history, and the same exact judge, on the exact same day, and I saw people who didn’t look like me get much worse sentences.”

Packer of Drug Policy Alliance, who led Los Angeles’s cannabis regulation department from 2017 to 2022, also worries broadly about whether the aspects of Issue 2 that seek to promote social equity will be preserved. As both medical and recreational marijuana become legalized across the country—40 states allow at least medical use— it’s become commonplace for states to undertake restorative efforts like this one, but that wasn’t always true. 

“There has been a seismic shift,” Brian Vicente, an attorney and national leader in marijuana policy, told Bolts. Vicente, who is from Ohio, co-authored the measure that legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado in 2012, kick-starting a national movement. He also advised this year on Issue 2 in Ohio.

“Every law we see now has an attempt to address social equity issues and to try to remedy some of the harms of cannabis prohibition,” he added. “We didn’t see that for years and, in Colorado, it polled horribly and so we kept it out of the conversation in 2012. We cared deeply about the issue, but Colorado voters didn’t care.”

Because Colorado did not address social equity on the front end of its legal marijuana program, it has had to play catch-up for many years and remains behind the curve, current and prospective business owners of color in that state have said consistently. The same pattern has held elsewhere: in its short history, the legal marijuana industry in this country has shown in various states that it would marginalize Black people and other communities of color absent intentional intervention by regulators, even though those communities suffered the brunt of enforcement before legalization. 

Ohio has itself already learned that lesson: Black entrepreneurs have complained for years of being left out of the state’s medical marijuana industry. (Medical marijuana was legalized in Ohio in 2016.) 

Some states have sought not just to mend past harms through equitable business licensing, but also to allow people to wipe clean their criminal records for certain marijuana-related offenses. Ohio earlier this year passed broad legislation to streamline expungement for misdemeanor crimes, including simple marijuana possession, but neither this law nor Issue 2 creates a pathway for automatic record expungement. Automation eliminates the difficult and costly process of petitioning for expungement, and helps the legislation more widely impact the populations it’s intended to reach. Minnesota’s 2022 marijuana legalization law, for example, included an automatic expungement provision that impacted an estimated 50,000 people. 

Tom Haren, spokesman for the campaign to pass the measure, told Bolts his side was bound by rules limiting state ballot measures to single issues, which meant that Issue 2 could not force changes to the law regarding both regulation and record expungement. 

But while Issue 2 doesn’t mandate anything related to criminal records, the law does spend paragraphs detailing the profundity of the harm inflicted by criminalization.

“Individuals who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws suffer long-lasting negative consequences, including impacts to employment, business ownership, housing, health, and long-term financial well-being,” the law states. “Family members, especially children, and communities of those who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws, suffer from emotional, psychological, and financial harms as a result of such arrests or incarcerations.”

This, the law continues, argues for “remedying the harms resulting from the disproportionate enforcement of marijuana-related laws.”

Advocates hold out hope that some future legislation can address these harms, but for now their biggest concern is that lawmakers keep intact as much of Issue 2’s language as possible.

Packer said that when she reviewed those sections of Issue 2, plus those meant to promote equity in licensure, she feared that lawmakers would not let them stand if the ballot measure passed. Now that it has, and now that leading Republicans have signaled they’ll revise the law, she added, “I imagine those may be some of the first provisions that are on the chopping block.”

Because Ohio is 24th among U.S. states to legalize marijuana, Packer added, it cannot plead ignorance as to what will happen should lawmakers scrap equity-minded provisions of Issue 2. “Ohio should know better and it is in a position to do better,” she said.

The post After Ohioans Legalize Weed, GOP Leaders Already Want to Roll Back Key Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

After the Supreme Court removed federal protections for abortion in its Dobbs decision last June, the state’s attorney general immediately petitioned a federal judge to enforce a 2019 law that banned abortion after six weeks. It included an exception for when the mother’s life is at stake but not for instances of rape or incest. The six-week ban remained in effect for nearly three months, until a lawsuit brought by abortion providers led to an indefinite stay of the law. During that 82-day window, the costs associated with abortion care skyrocketed, and people were forced to cross state lines to seek the procedure—including, notoriously, a ten-year-old whose heartbreaking story became embroiled in a national controversy. 

The Abortion Fund of Ohio jumped into action, helping hundreds of Ohioans seek care elsewhere, in states where they could access abortion. The fund helped reroute them “out of state to be able to get the care that they were entitled to,” recalls Maggie Scotece, a doula and attorney who is currently serving as the organization’s interim executive director. (The organization is part of the coalition supporting Issue 1.)

But the organization, which helps people fund and access abortions, also received confused calls from, or on behalf of, people who could not travel: minors in group homes or juvenile justice centers, and people on probation and parole. 

Hundreds of thousands of Ohioans have their freedom of movement greatly restricted because they’re under some form of state supervision, and the stakes of Issue 1 may be highest for them. 

 According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative, Ohio ranks fourth nationally in the share of its population under any form of carceral control (this includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole), behind Idaho, Arkansas, and Georgia—“and that’s largely due to the massive number of people who are on probation,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at PPI.

A 2023 PPI report found that, at any time, some 191,000 state residents are on probation, which is an alternative to incarceration that comes with heavy restrictions and surveillance, while around 22,000 more are on parole, a form of post-release supervision that in Ohio is baked into prison sentences. “Probation is handed out like candy here in Hamilton County,” said Sean Vicente, a Hamilton County (Cincinnati) public defender. 

Abortion is currently legal up to 21 weeks and 6 days in Ohio because of the legal dispute over the 2019 law. Meanwhile the campaign to pass Issue 1 and permanently codify abortion rights has raised millions of dollars and gained traction; recent polls have found that between 52 percent and 58 percent of prospective voters supported the measure. 

But Issue 1 has also garnered many opponents, especially among the state’s Republican leadership. If it fails, Scotece predicted that the state supreme court, which has a GOP majority, will “almost certainly” reinstate the six-week ban. 

If that happens, people on probation or parole would face an impossible choice, Vicente said: “Do I travel out of state to take care of that health care issue and possibly get locked up? Or do I have an unplanned pregnancy? Do I have an ectopic pregnancy? Do I have a child via rape?” 

“It’s going to put poor people in a really tough spot where they have to truly decide between health care and liberty,” he told Bolts. 

Parole and probation are often conceived of as alternatives to incarceration that can keep more people in their communities. But both systems are so full of delays, requirements, and catch-22s that Vicente says he and his fellow public defenders often fear they are “setting up our clients to fail.” 

“The restrictions that are placed on people—and the ban on traveling out of state, which is common, is one of these—are often so onerous that people say that they would just rather be in prison,” Bertram said. 

At any given time, 39 percent of the people in Ohio’s jails are being detained because they violated the terms of their probation or parole, according to the PPI report. That’s double the national average of 20 percent. 

“I can understand it being that high, because anything can get you [violated],” said Malika Kidd, who helps women navigate reentry as the Program Director for the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry in Akron and Cleveland. “You can be around another person that was in prison and you can get violated, just in the same area with them. Somebody in your family can have a gun with them and you’re around it, you could be violated. If you get a traffic ticket and don’t let them know, you can be violated.”

Though women are generally proportionally underrepresented within the criminal legal system, they are far more likely to be on probation than under other forms of correctional control, and both parole and probation compliance present special challenges for women. “Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children—all of the requirements that supervision imposes that get in the way of childcare are going to fall harder on women,” Bertram said. “That takes a huge amount of time out of your day.” There are fewer reentry programs serving women, who are more likely to be homeless upon their release—another factor that would make it difficult to comply with the often onerous requirements that accompany supervision. “It’s a combination of a lot of stuff that can overwhelm anybody,” said Kidd. 

Kidd is, in many ways, the face of women’s reentry in Ohio, but her experience with parole there illustrates how arbitrary and burdensome the system can be—and how it restricts people’s freedom of movement. In 2001, after police found cocaine in her car on a trip from Chicago to Cleveland, she was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Her son was just three years old; by the time she got out, he was 17. 

As part of her mandatory minimum sentence, Kidd was given a 5-year “post-control release” term. From the beginning, she says, her parole officer seemed biased against her and determined to make her life harder. The woman upped her risk level, calling her a flight risk because she is originally from Illinois, and forced her to wear an ankle bracelet, which tracked her movements and prohibited her from leaving Ohio. Some people on probation cannot even leave their county of residence without permission. 

Moreover, Kidd says her parole officer exacerbated the already toilsome process with delays in processing her requests for permission to travel outside the state. Ironically, some of Kidd’s requests were in order to speak at conferences about the myriad barriers associated with reentry. Her work was understanding about her spending hours at the parole office waiting for approval, she said, but “I’m sure there were plenty of other employers that weren’t as flexible as mine,” which could leave people to choose between potentially losing their job—a violation of parole conditions in itself—or giving up on the travel request. 

If abortion were once again banned in Ohio, people on parole or probation might be forced to choose between lying to the officer or judge assigned to their case about their reasons for travel, going out of state without permission, or being honest. The former two options both carry the risk of violating your supervision terms and being reincarcerated. 

Vicente said he couldn’t fathom any judges signing off on a travel request that involved going out of state to do something that would violate the law if done within state borders. 

He said, “You’re petitioning the court to say, ‘Hey, I know this is against the law here in Ohio, but I need my client to travel up to Michigan to get the care she needs. Judge, are you willing to allow her to travel out of state to break the law that’s currently in effect in Ohio?’ That I doubt any judges would sign off on.” 

“I think there’s gonna be a lot of frenzied and panicked calls, and it’s gonna put us in a tight spot as well,” Vicente added, wondering how his fellow public defenders would begin to advise their clients under such circumstances. 

An unexpected and unwanted pregnancy—and the stress, exhaustion, physical and hormonal changes, and increased number of health check-ups that tend to follow in its wake—could also make it harder to comply with the terms of supervision. “The medical needs are going to take priority over visiting the probation officer, which puts you in further jeopardy,” Vicente said. More people being forced to carry to term a pregnancy that they don’t want and can’t handle could ultimately contribute to the already high percentage of Ohioans jailed for violating the terms of their supervision.

With polling showing public support for abortion and other reproductive health rights, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recently proposed to soften Ohio’s six-week ban if it were to come back into effect and to allow some exceptions, for example in the case of rape. But other Republican lawmakers have already resisted such changes. 

Republicans also tried to change the rules of the initiative process in Ohio to undermine this abortion rights measure, which was petitioned onto the ballot by organizers who collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. GOP lawmakers called a special election in August asking voters to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent. That proposal failed by a wide margin in August.

The GOP’s proposal to change the rules in August was also called Issue 1, which has led to concerns of voter confusion as abortion rights proponents who fought the summer’s Issue 1 are now campaigning for people to approve the new Issue 1. 

If Issue 1 fails, it would add to the existing barriers that preventOhioans from accessing reproductive care. 

Even though abortion is currently legal up to nearly 22 weeks on paper, access is extremely limited in practice, Scotece of the Abortion Fund of Ohio said. While Ohio had more than 40 clinics in the ‘90s, anti-abortion groups have been “incredibly successful” in seeking to close them down, she told Bolts. The state now has just nine clinics concentrated in Ohio’s big cities, only three of which perform abortions up until the legal limit. 

Meanwhile, Scotece stressed that Ohio is already one of the leading states for the criminalization of pregnancy, whether it be arrests and prosecutions for self-managed abortions or the use of narcotics while pregnant. A 2021 study done by researchers at the University of California San Francisco that surveyed people who searched for abortion care via Google showed that intensifying abortion restrictions in the U.S. have led to an increase in self-managed abortions, including by attempting to hurt oneself or ingest drugs and alcohol—which would likely further expose people to criminalization. 

“We already know that folks who are low income, folks that are already under state scrutiny, whether it’s for parole or the family policing system, are more likely to be criminalized for pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes regardless of whether or not that is related to abortion,” Scotece said. 

Codifying the right to abortion and other reproductive care, and creating legal protections for people and organizations that assist others in accessing abortions, won’t solve all of these problems, Scotece added. But it will create a new test that Ohio courts must use when considering the constitutionality of a law that restricts or criminalizes abortion in the state. 

Kidd is not actively campaigning for Issue 1, but told Bolts she supports it. “It’s a woman’s right and I think these good old boys should not decide what a woman should do with her body.”

Correction (Nov. 1): An earlier version of this article misstated a quote from the Abortion Fund of Ohio, and inaccurately stated the number of Ohioans who sought out-of-state care when the six-week ban was enacted.

The post If Abortion Measure Fails, Ohioans on Parole And Probation Could Face Graver Restrictions appeared first on Bolts.

Louisiana’s voting machines are from 2006—old enough that when they falter, Hanna says, it’s often impossible to locate replacement parts. That’s a common frustration: aging voting equipment poses a projected multi-billion-dollar concern in the United States, amid a general national crisis of underfunding for local election administration. 

“The state is scrambling to make sure they have enough machines for everyone, but we can’t get them anymore,” Hanna, a Republican, told Bolts. “We’re just hanging on.”

Hers is the kind of local election office that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he sought to help in 2020, when he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated some $350 million to a previously obscure nonprofit organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which helps maintain and improve local election procedures and ballot access around the country. The COVID-19 pandemic had just set in, and election administrators, who in many cases already had limited budgets and inadequate staffing, were facing dramatic new challenges: outfitting poll workers with personal protective equipment, establishing drive-through voting, and preparing for much more mail-in voting than usual, to name a few.

An NPR analysis done soon after the election found officials applied for and accepted some amount of CTCL money in more than 2,500 different local jurisdictions, covering every U.S. state except Louisiana, Delaware, and Wyoming. The money was used for a variety of purposes, including ballot processing equipment and improved pay for election workers.

Those early-pandemic days of emergency voting procedures ended long ago, but the CTCL donations set off a wave of political uproar around election funding that is still rippling through state governments, including in Louisiana—even though none of the money even reached election offices there. 

Now, after three years and several legislative attempts in Louisiana to kick private money out of elections offices, the state will become the first in the nation to vote on the matter directly. In the Oct. 14 election, Louisianans will see a proposed constitutional amendment, placed on the ballot by the GOP-controlled legislature, that would ban private or foreign money from being used for the purpose of conducting elections.

This proposed ban, Amendment 1, would if passed make Louisiana the 26th state to adopt such restrictions, all directly inspired by what conservatives have demonized as “Zuckerbucks” spent on elections during the onset of the pandemic. The billionaire’s donations have drawn particular ire from conservatives convinced that CTCL boosted Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, and the partisan outrage is clearly reflected in state policies: 23 of the 25 states that already adopted such restrictions voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or have Republican legislative trifectas, or both. 

Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state, Kyle Ardoin, initially urged local election offices to apply for CTCL grants. But soon after, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now a candidate in Louisiana’s November gubernatorial election, sent parish clerks a letter warning that it would be illegal to accept the money and ordering them to stop seeking it. (Landry’s warning was incorrect; state law at the time said nothing about how local offices could raise money for elections.)

Clerks across Louisiana were suddenly blocked from large sums of money that could have helped with the myriad challenges they faced in running smooth elections on dated equipment during a pandemic. Hanna’s parish, for one, was set to receive $114,000 before Landry stepped in, according to the Louisiana Clerks of Court Association.

Louisiana might have already joined other states with a law banning the donations if not for its Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, who is term-limited and will exit office in January. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, he vetoed anti-“Zuckerbucks” bills passed by the legislature, condemning what he termed an “unnecessary political ploy.” Statehouse Republicans circumvented the governor this year by referring their proposal directly to the ballot; with supermajorities in each chamber, they sent the ballot measure to voters without ever needing Edwards’ sign-off.

Peter Robins-Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Louisiana Progress and an advocate for voting rights, has little doubt that Amendment 1 will pass, even as no polling on the issue has been publicly released to date. Robins-Brown said he finds it troubling, though, that state Republicans have been so bullish on this policy for several years running, without taking seriously the broader concerns that Zuckerburg’s money was supposed to help alleviate.

“If you’re going to do this,” he told Bolts, “you also need to make sure that election administration is fully funded, and that’s where I think there’s the element of potential bad faith here: you’re going after this one piece of the larger puzzle without addressing the underlying problem, which is underfunding of election administration.”

Louisiana’s election funding problems go beyond the outdated voting machines. Hanna said local elections officials like her struggle to recruit and pay election workers, and Debbie Hudnall, executive director of the Louisiana Clerks of Court Association, added that some clerks can’t staff up adequately during elections.

“Finding citizens who want to spend those hours working the polls—sometimes that’s been difficult,” Hudnall, herself an elected parish clerk from 1980-2007, told Bolts. “Back when I was a clerk of court, people felt it was a civic duty to go work the elections. It’s harder now.”

Neither that problem nor the issues of aging infrastructure and general underfunding of elections are unique to Louisiana or the primarily red states that have taken up bans on outside funding of elections. But “Zuckerbucks” critics have noted that the donated money disproportionately aided election administrators in states that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

While CTCL says it distributed grants to election administrators in 47 states, the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, found that the grant money benefitted Biden states that year almost twice as much as it did Trump states—$217 million to $114 million. In per-capita funding, the group found, Georgia—a critical battleground in the last presidential election—was by far the highest state beneficiary, and the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan all ranked among the top seven in per-capita funding from the group. All sided with Biden in 2020.

CTCL has said that it disbursed money based only on applications received, in a process that states opted into. The organization also defended itself against allegations of Democratic bias, stating in 2021, “There were no partisan questions in the grant applications. CTCL COVID-19 Response grant funding decisions were not made on a partisan basis, and as demonstrated by the jurisdictions across the political spectrum that received money, partisan considerations played no role in the availability or awarding of funding.”

Conservatives backing Louisiana’s Amendment 1 have not only rejected the nonprofit’s defense, but roped their outrage over “Zuckerbucks” into a broader, conspiracy-fueled Trumpist narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. In a letter to the editors of The Advocate, Louisiana Republican Party Chair Louis Gurvich said that the money “was used by Democrat political machines across the country for highly partisan get-out-the-vote efforts such as vote harvesting, ballot drop-off boxes, etc.”

The campaign to pass Amendment 1 counts among its supporters the Election Transparency Initiative, which is chaired by former Trump appointee Ken Cuccinelli and which opposes policies that have been shown to increase democratic participation, including same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration.

But even as they put the question in front of voters, the conservatives who pushed for Amendment 1 don’t appear to be harnessing much grassroots passion; to the contrary, Hanna told Bolts, the “Zuckerbucks” controversy is something average voters rarely raise with local officials like her. There is no organized campaign for or against the measure, and state campaign finance data show no one has spent any money formally opposing or supporting it.

In the absence of much public discourse on the matter, voters will be left with a question that Louisiana voting rights advocates worry is so facially simple—a referendum on private interests influencing election procedures—as to totally belie the far-right, anti-democratic movement in the background.

Robins-Brown says that without context, many people of varying political stripes will likely be persuaded by the argument that a private or foreign interest shouldn’t be sending Louisiana money to perform basic governmental operations. 

“This thing that had its genesis around conspiracy theories in the midst of COVID did sort of morph into an idea that is viable. I’m not saying I’m fully on board and that I’ll vote yes, but I think there’s a solid point here,” he said.

Ashley Shelton, a progressive organizer who founded and leads Louisiana’s Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, told Bolts her organization does plan to campaign against Amendment 1. She said Amendment 1’s backers have exposed their hypocrisy by slamming “Zuckerbucks” without turning scrutiny to the myriad other ways that outside money influences policy and thus state governmental function. 

In 2021, for example, the same Louisiana state legislature that had just passed an anti-“Zuckerbucks” bill also passed a spending bill allowing itself to receive and spend money obtained via private donations. The irony was not lost on Edwards, who, in a letter accompanying his veto of the former bill, questioned how “the Legislature is somehow immune from the improper influence of grants and donations that … would end up corrupting local election officials.” 

Said Shelton,“They’re worried about Zuckerburg but nobody is talking about these other agendas that are also supported by private money that isn’t Zuckerburg.”

Shelton said she can only conclude, then, that Amendment 1 is meant to evoke fear and to continue choking efforts to streamline ballot access and boost turnout. She notes that the measure seeks to ban “foreign” money in election administration—a response to a fictitious threat, she said, but a useful way to gin up voter outrage. 

“I’ve been doing election work in the state of Louisiana for a very long time, and I have not been and am not worried about the engagement of a foreign government,” she said. “This is worse than a solution in search of a problem. This is all about election administration and creating more limitations and barriers to voting.”

The post Louisiana First in the Nation to Vote on Banning Private Elections Funding appeared first on Bolts.

Abortion advocates rejoiced, but for some organizers watching around the country, the result was especially exhilarating because it spoke to the fight they’re going through in their own backyards to defend direct democracy.

South Dakotans last year defeated an amendment similar to Ohio’s, which came on the heels of initiatives to increase the minimum wage and legalize cannabis and would have kneecapped a measure to expand Medicaid. In Arkansas, the GOP repeatedly asked voters to limit the initiative process but lost repeatedly at the polls; this year, they adopted new restrictions anyway. Idaho organizers in 2018 expanded Medicaid through a ballot measure, and the GOP keeps trying to make initiatives harder ever since.

Anti-initiative proposals just keep popping up in many other places, including Arizona, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah. And they reemerge even after they’re defeated, forcing proponents of direct democracy to dedicate capacity and resources to protecting the rules of engagement—and to constantly look over their shoulder.

Bolts this week gathered three organizers who have fought this dynamic in each of three states that are undergoing this dynamic: Ohio, Arkansas, and Idaho. Their meeting sparked a wide-ranging conversation about their shared frustrations and strategies.

Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, was active in the campaign to defeat Issue 1 this summer. Kwami Abdul-Bey, elections coordinator at the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, helped form a coalition to defeat a similar measure in Arkansas last year. As the co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, Luke Mayville launched the initiative to expand Medicaid in 2018 and he has since organized to defend the initiative process in Idaho. 

In a conversation that took place days after Ohio’s election, they took stock of the fights they are  embroiled in together and discussed what explains their convergence. “Oligarchic agendas,” Mayville said, “have everything to gain from shutting down the initiative process.” They’ve each worked separately to protect initiatives in their states, but the attacks they faced and the lessons they learned are similar, and they shared organizing and messaging tips with one another.

“This is a great group to be talking to,” Lewis said. “Because they’re not doing this in one state, they do these things repeatedly in different states, so why shouldn’t we strategize?” 

What attacks on direct democracy have you each fought in your own states?

Luke Mayville (Idaho): We came on the scene in 2018 with a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid that was successful. The legislature reacted by attacking the initiative process. The big showdown came in 2021, when they passed a very restrictive law that would have made it impossible to get future initiatives on the ballot. We sued and got a unanimous decision by the state supreme court striking down that anti-initiative law: They declared for the first time that the initiative process is a fundamental right, and that sent a really strong signal from the court to the legislature. But they came back again this year: They took the rules that had been struck down and tried to put it into the constitution. We put together a bipartisan coalition in the House and blocked the amendment. But we anticipate that they will try again in the next session.

Kwami Abdul-Bey (Arkansas): Ours was because in 2016 and 2018, we were successful in increasing the minimum wage and passing medical marijuana. The response to us doing that was, ‘we’re going to fuck you guys by not allowing you to do this again.’ It happened twice: In 2020 and again in 2022, they tried to increase the percentage [for future initiatives to pass] from a simple majority to 60 percent. They were defeated in both years. This year, they just said, ‘OK, since we can’t get this in the Constitution, we’ll just write a law.’ They wrote a law increasing geographic requirements [for signatures], and that’s currently in front of our supreme court. Your supreme court win in Idaho would be very instructive, Luke, and I’d love to read what it has said.

Mia Lewis (Ohio): In Ohio, Issue 1 was a response to the fact that reproductive rights was going to be put on the ballot this November, so they wanted to make sure that the pass rate was higher. At first they said it’s not about abortion rights, but the important people that were pushing this would admit, in semi-private situations, that it’s 100 percent about abortion. And they’ve already said that they’re going to come back and try again, so we’re expecting that.

All of you have described these anti-initiative reforms as direct responses to groups like yours working on specific initiatives. What would you say is fueling that reaction?

Lewis: A lot of the attacks on direct democracy are linked to the abortion issue, and if it’s not an abortion issue, it’s something else where they don’t like an answer that the people gave. If they don’t get the answer that they want at the polls, or if they’re afraid of the answer that they might get at the polls, well, ‘we’ll change the rules and we’ll make it harder for people to be able to express themselves.’

Our society is filled with these billionaires who want to be able to buy whatever they want, and corporate interests are not satisfied with just letting democracy take its course and listening to the people. Direct democracy is the thorn in the side of these billionaires and corporate special interests, and they don’t want to be thwarted.

Mayville: It really is in the last 10 to 15 years that there’s been a wave of organizers in states realizing that the initiative process can be a powerful way to address social and economic injustices, and picking up that tool and running with it, in many cases overcoming huge odds to get these things on the ballot. If you’re a special interest group that’s mastered the craft of lobbying legislatures, the initiative power is a very scary thing. It’s harder to control the decisions of the general public than of 100 legislators in the state capitol.

Some agendas only really have people power on their side, others have people power and quite a lot of money. But then there are a whole lot of agendas that only have the money, and they’re deeply unpopular: I would call them oligarchic agendas. And those agendas have everything to gain from shutting down the initiative process. The payday loan industry, for example, has been fiercely opposed to initiatives. There was an anti-initiative law proposed in 2019 [in Idaho], and we learned from an investigative article that the legislator who sponsored it had consulted with a payday loan industry lobbyist, and was exposed in the middle of the fight for it. 

The battles you described in each of your states are very similar to one another. Would you characterize the current situation as a national attack on direct democracy, or would that be simplifying differences between state contexts?

Mayville: It certainly appears that there is a nationally coordinated attack on the initiative process; my understanding is that dismantling the initiative has been a major objective of organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council and various corporate special interests across the country. The main agenda is to undercut any exercise of collective power to address social injustice, economic injustices. 

Abdul-Bey: Luke mentioned ALEC, and when you look at a bill that lands on a committee here in Arkansas, that has the same language that it has in Ohio and Idaho, we know that there’s something going on that’s producing all of this legislation. 

What we are guilty of, is we’re guilty of not really being prepared for this onslaught, and so we’re trying to catch up. In Arkansas, we work with a national organization called BISC, the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and BISC has trained me as a ballot measure leader and also helped us put together messaging and create a statewide coalition, both on the left and the right, where we’re able to agree that this fundamental right of direct democracy. When you called me, Daniel, I was actually at a BISC training in St. Louis, where there were about 16-17 states represented, and we were comparing notes and trading techniques.

In fighting these anti-initiative proposals, what messaging and argument have you felt are especially successful?

Abdul-Bey: Here in Arkansas, the state motto is, “the people rule.” So we used that state model as our foundation. We just go out and remind them that our state motto is the people rule. How can the people rule if we are not allowed to put forth constitutional amendments, legislative measures, and veto referendums? 

In addition, our constitution states that the power of the state rests in the people, and that the people loan their power to the legislature, the governor and the judiciary, so we’re able to use that in our messaging to basically have a civics lesson for our citizens. You can’t go out and just change the rules so that you can win; when you change the rules in your favor, you’re cheating.

Lewis: I want to say straight up that we designed a flier that we distributed, over 250,000 of them, all across the state, and I based that 100 percent on messaging from Arkansas: The messaging that, ‘corrupt politicians and special interests are trying to trick voters into giving up their power, giving away their rights,’ that was from Arkansas. So I’d like to thank you. 

I really feel like that encapsulated the issue: They’re trying to trick you into giving up your power. And I would say, I don’t want to wake up on Wednesday with fewer rights than I had on Tuesday. They have enough power, we need our own power. This messaging about freedom and rights is very cross partisan. On the one side we have the people and on the other we have the corrupt politicians and special interests who are bankrolling them. 

Mayville: I love that you’re trading these messages about how they’re trying to take the power of citizens away. We found that to be such a powerful thing. When legislators were trying to convince one another, you would hear them making arguments against democracy—the John Birch argument that ‘we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic.’ The minute they start having to appeal to ordinary voters, they drop that argument and have to divert attention. Because if it’s a debate about whether ordinary people should have a lot of political power, it’s an 80/20 issue.

In addition, when you’re waging these battles, it’s incredibly powerful to draw on the traditions of your own state. We found that there’s this very strong appeal we can make to the constitutional heritage of Idaho, the fact that we have had these constitutional rights for over 100 years.

Ohio’s Issue 1 only addressed the rules of direct democracy, but it also became a proxy battle over abortion rights. Is it helpful in defending direct democracy when the debate focuses on the underlying substantive issues, or does it complicate things?

Lewis: That’s a complicated question. The official ‘vote no’ campaign didn’t want to be too tightly associated with reproductive rights because they correctly saw that it was about many other things. But the ‘vote yes’ campaign tried to tie it to abortion. And on the ground with the volunteers [for the ‘vote no’ campaign] who were out there spreading the word, damn straight they cared about abortion. Damn straight, they wanted to protect their rights and not have them taken away. So yeah, that was an issue for individuals on the ground who care about this. 

Mayville: It’s important to think carefully about exactly what message is going to resonate, and that again echoes back to the corrupt politicians and special interests trying to take away your power. That’s the ten words that you repeat a million times. 

Take the issue we’re most known for, Medicaid expansion, and take the issue of initiative rights: As soon as we went out and started talking with ordinary people, we immediately found that initiative rights had broader appeal. And that’s saying a lot because Medicaid expansion got 61 percent of the vote [in 2018]. People would come up to us and say, ‘I don’t necessarily agree with that initiative you all did, but you had a right to put that on the ballot.’ Similarly, it’s a very common occurrence when you’re getting signatures that people say, ‘I’m not sure I agree with you, but I want this to be on the ballot so that voters can have a chance,’ and they’ll sign it.

Abdul-Bey: We train our canvassers who collect signatures—and Luke spoke to this—to tell people that you’re not signing this to determine your agreement. You’re signing to determine that we have a right to put it on the ballot, that you support the concept of direct democracy.

Also, we’ve been very successful in reminding the people of Arkansas that we would still be at $7/hour minimum wage if it were not for our successfully getting the minimum wage on the ballot. Working-poor Arkansans know the benefits because they have lived with the benefits, and we remind them, ‘Hey, you are paid this much an hour because of this type of work.’

You’ve all described the relentlessness of this fight, and I can imagine the toll that takes on you and your organizations. So where does that leave you today—more optimistic or nervous?  

Lewis: We’re feeling good! We’re pumped because we feel like we won to keep our right to direct democracy, and dammit we’re going to use it. I think the fact that reproductive rights are on the ballot in November helps people feel mobilized: whether or not that’s an issue you support, just the fact that people get a chance to vote. Recreational marijuana is also going to be on the ballot, and then redistricting is right around the corner. We know they’re already plotting something, of course we do, but we’re trying to feel optimistic right now about it for sure.

Mayville: It can be very exhausting. We were in the middle of a debate on school vouchers, and in the middle of that there’s this constitutional amendment fight over the initiative process. We’d already fought twice on that issue, we thought we had put it to rest with a unanimous supreme court ruling. However, the way we’ve decided to think about it, which I do think is the right way for organizers in states to take on this challenge, is to see it as an organizing opportunity: For all of the exhaustion, this is an issue that has much broader support than most of the other issues that we’re organizing around, so it’s really this extraordinary opportunity to use the issue of initiative rights as a bridge to connect people and start a conversation. 

Abdul-Bey: One thing we do in Arkansas is we not only use it to organize but also to strategize for the future. A ballot measure that we’re in the process of authoring is to enshrine those initiative rights within the constitution, using what we’ve learned over the last seven years to plug all of the holes that they have tried to run 18-wheelers through. 

And we’re reaching out to the Lukes and the Mias of the world, and working with BISC, to make sure that we are all unified, working together and using that collective energy to maintain this battle. It is tiring, but at the same time, it’s rejuvenating. And when we heard of Mia’s win, we celebrated and partied because we know that what happened in Ohio is an example of us turning the tide around.

The roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.

The post ‘We Have a Right to Put It on the Ballot’: How Organizers Are Defending Direct Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

A measure to change Ohio’s constitution to make it harder to pass future constitutional amendments failed on Tuesday. With an estimated 65 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday night, more than 57 percent of Ohioans voted against Issue 1, the GOP-backed constitutional amendment.

The result is a major victory for Democrats, liberals and abortion rights in a state that has trended hard to the right over the past decade—and keeps alive Ohioans’ ability to circumvent the Republican-controlled legislature to achieve policy changes in the coming years. 

“Ohio voters refused to vote to give up their own power. They saw through the outright lies and obfuscation,” Mia Lewis of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government group that opposed the measure, texted Bolts. “They stood up for majority rule and their right to bring issues to the ballot. We are thrilled. This is a good day for democracy!”

Issue 1 proposed to raise the threshold of passage for future initiatives from 50 to 60 percent. It also would have made it harder to qualify measures for the ballot by increasing the number of petition signatures groups would need to qualify an issue for the ballot..

Most immediately and significantly, its failure means that this November’s constitutional referendum to protect abortion rights will only need to surpass 50 percent of the vote to be enshrined in the state constitution. 

The Ohio ballot measure is the latest state-level referendum to protect abortion rights after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, following successful statewide votes to protect abortion rights in California, Kansas, Michigan, and Vermont.

The election turned into an expensive and hard-fought proxy battle over abortion rights, with tens of millions of dollars pouring in from national groups on both sides of the issue.

But that’s far from the only looming policy fight where this threshold matters: Unions and Democrats are also gearing up for a 2024 ballot initiative to raise Ohio’s minimum wage to $15 by 2028.

The measure would have significantly curtailed a tool Ohio voters have available to them for more than a century. The 50 percent referendum threshold has existed since 1912.

The result is also a significant setback for the conservative politicians who, after months of infighting, backed a statewide referendum to change the threshold to amend Ohio’s constitution by popular vote and make it harder to get constitutional amendments on the ballot in the first place. Those include Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who campaigned hard for it and is running in next year’s election for the U.S. Senate, as well as the GOP state legislators who created the referendum in the first place.

While some Republicans claimed otherwise, they also admitted that kneecapping November’s abortion referendum was their motivation for holding the vote now. 

Republican legislators passed a law in December that banned August elections because they were expensive to hold, unnecessary and bad for democracy because of historically low turnout during the quiet, hot month when many people take vacation during schools’ summer break. And the 60 percent threshold they chose was notable given that multiple polls have found that significantly more than 50 percent of Ohioans support the abortion rights vote—but most found that number just below 60 percent. 

Voter turnout for Tuesday’s election was sky-high, especially given the unusual timing of the election and the fact that the referendum was the only thing on the ballot. 

More voters turned out for Tuesday’s referendum than in the state’s 2022 primaries, a remarkable result given that those primaries featured many competitive races, including for governor and the U.S. Senate. 

And it’s the latest example of Republicans looking to undermine direct democracy and limit voters’ ability to overrule them on policy. Arkansas Republicans recently made it harder to qualify issues for ballot measures, and Utah Republicans did the same in 2021.

When voters have had their say on these changes, though, they have tended to reject them. South Dakotans rejected a GOP-backed constitutional amendment to increase the threshold to pass ballot initiatives last summer; Republicans had called the vote just months before a major showdown over Medicaid expansion in November. A similar measure in 2022 failed in Arkansas.

Ohio’s result indicates just how potent an issue abortion rights remains for voters even in GOP-leaning states, and following successful statewide votes in places like Kansas shows that this will remain a powerful issue for Democrats.

The coalition of liberal groups were confident from the start that they would prevail on this vote, but didn’t take any chances, outraising and outspending their opponents by a wide margin for much of the race.

But in the election’s final weeks, conservative groups backing the referendum poured an additional $5 million into a last-minute statewide TV buy, according to sources tracking advertising, pulling the two sides roughly to parity in the race.

Both sides mixed their messaging on the referendum, targeting different groups with specific messages given the sweeping implications of the vote. Pro- and anti-abortion rights groups spent heavily to turn out their base voters on the issue while also painting it as a fight for checks on power and fundamental principles of democracy. 

On top of that, those opposing the measure spent heavily to make it clear this would further empower politicians and take away Ohioans’ ability to overrule their elected officials. Those supporting the bill ran ads arguing that the referendum would make it harder for deep-pocketed out-of-state interests to spend heavily to change state policy—a deeply ironic message given that the vast majority of money spent on this race (on both sides) came from out of state. They also claimed that the groups opposing the referendum supported “ “abolishing parental rights” and sent voters mailers arguing that this measure would not only prevent abortion rights from taking hold in Ohio, but keep a whole host of progressive ideals at bay, from “critical race theory” to ideas about gender and sexuality being taught in schools. 

But it was clear—to both supporters and detractors—that the main things they were voting on was abortion rights and their ability to change the state constitution. And Ohioans resoundingly declared that they want to preserve both rights.

“The voters made it clear that the power of the people will always rise above deceitful, out-of-touch politicians,” said House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, texted Bolts. “Ohio’s constitution and the people’s fundamental freedom to determine our own future has been preserved, but the fight is not over. Citizen-led ballot initiatives give voice to the power of the people, and it will never be silenced.”

The post Ohioans Reject GOP Effort to Weaken Direct Democracy, in Big Win for Abortion Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Ohio Republicans passed a measure in May that creates an Aug. 8 election to end Ohioans’ right to directly amend their state constitution with a simple majority vote.

Voters will decide on that day whether to adopt a proposal that would increase the threshold to change Ohio’s constitution from 50 to 60 percent, and that would make it harder for residents to get constitutional amendments on the ballot in the first place. If it passes, the measure would dramatically curtail a tool of direct democracy that has existed in the state for more than a century.

“It’s an attempt to fool voters into giving away their power,” said Mia Lewis of Common Cause Ohio, a pro-democracy group that opposes the amendment.

Ohio Republicans’ latest effort follows a recent pattern. In numerous states where they have near-total dominance and the only option to challenge them is through statewide referendums or constitutional amendments, Republicans have moved to attack direct democracy itself.

Arkansas Republicans recently passed a law that makes it harder to qualify ballot measures for a popular vote, as did Utah in 2021. Arizona Republicans attempted to do the same last fall, to mixed results. Republican legislators in Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota and Oklahoma have made similar attempts this year, to varying degrees of success. In the maneuver most reminiscent of Ohio’s, South Dakota Republicans rushed through a summer referendum last year in an attempt to make it harder for a Medicaid expansion plan to pass later that year. Voters rejected their last-minute gambit, then passed Medicaid expansion over their objections last fall.

Now, Republicans are trying the same playbook in Ohio.

The precipitating reason for this amendment is a push to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that ended the federally-guaranteed right to an abortion, Ohio Republicans passed legislation to ban most abortion in the state, though that law is currently pending legal review. Abortion rights groups responded with a campaign to amend the constitution, attempting to follow in the footsteps of similar initiatives that passed in California, Michigan, and Vermont last fall, and in March they got the greenlight to start collecting signatures for a November referendum.

Anti-abortion groups lobbied GOP lawmakers to support a constitutional amendment to make it harder for any future amendments to pass, and rush to get it in place before voters can weigh in on abortion.

“Their true motivation, aside from their insatiable desire for power, is to stop women from having the reproductive freedom that we so deserve,” Representative Jessica Miranda, Ohio House Democrats’ Minority Whip, told Bolts.

Republicans sought to paint this proposed amendment as a necessary adjustment to protect Ohioans against deep-pocketed out-of-state special interests rather than one focused on blocking abortion rights.

“By voting yes on August 8, Ohioans will be protecting our constitution from special interests for generations to come, while still preserving the people’s important role in governing our state,” Ohio GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou said in a recent statement. 

“We believe the Ohio constitution is a foundational document and shouldn’t be home to every whimsical issue that comes down the road,” said Rob Nichols, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose. 

But Republicans have occasionally admitted what this push is really about.

“There is a reason that every far left group in Ohio is fighting so hard to preserve their ability to do an end run around us,” state Representative Brian Stewart, the Republican who spearheaded the effort to create the referendum, wrote his GOP colleagues in a December letter obtained by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “After decades of work to make Ohio a pro-life state, the Left intends to write abortion on demand into Ohio’s Constitution. If they succeed, all the work accomplished by multiple Republican majorities will be undone, and we will return to 19,000+ babies being aborted each year.”

In holding this vote, Ohio Republicans are doing an about-face from a position they held just a few months ago. In December, the GOP-controlled legislature passed a law to eliminate August elections because of the difficulty and additional expense for holding them, as well as the historically low voter turnout during a time of year when many people are on vacation.

LaRose said at the time that August elections “aren’t good for the taxpayer, elections officials, voters or the civic health of our state,” and lamented their historically low turnout. 

But after the GOP failed to move the proposal through the legislature in time to put it on the ballot for the spring primary, LaRose and other Republicans changed their tune.

His spokesperson punted when asked why his boss had reversed his position.

“The general assembly has the authority to establish the time, place and manner for an election. It’s their call, and they chose to do an August election,” Nichols told Bolts. “It’s not our call.”

He also shrugged off concerns from local election workers about the cost and effort of an August election, saying he had faith that local officials were up to the task.

“They’re professionals, they’ve been through this before,” he said. “There have been August elections routinely in the past, and they’ve handled themselves flawlessly.”

The amendment’s opponents have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the vote from happening at all, arguing it violates this recently passed law banning most August elections.

In a separate lawsuit, they are seeking a court order to alter the Republican-drafted language for the amendment, which their lawyers described in a court brief as a “misleading, prejudicial ballot title and inaccurate.”

Surveys suggest Republicans are out of step with the voters in the GOP-leaning state—both on abortion and on their wish to curtail direct democracy.

An October poll by Baldwin Wallace University found that 59 percent of Ohioans supported a constitutional amendment to make abortion access a fundamental right—enough support to pass with a simple majority, but just shy of a 60-percent threshold—with just 27 percent opposing it. 

But it doesn’t seem like the GOP’s attempted end-around is any more popular with voters than their attempts to curtail abortion access.

An early May poll conducted by the group leading the efforts against the amendment to change constitutional referendums found that Ohio voters would oppose the measure by a margin of 52 to 21 percent. Strategists in both parties say that other private polling indicates the measure is currently opposed by majorities of Ohioans.

“The overwhelming response to this from people has been outrage,” Democratic Ohio state House Minority Leader Allison Russo told Bolts. “They see this as a power grab from a gerrymandered, unaccountable legislature that wants to take away power from people and put it more firmly into politicians’ hands.” 

The proposed amendment has drawn a broad swath of opposition. Traditional Democratic allies like Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO and numerous left-leaning labor groups have been joined by the Fraternal Order of Police and the Libertarian Party. The bipartisan Ohio Association of Elections Officials came out in official opposition to it because of the added work and unnecessary cost to taxpayers, which is expected to run as high as $20 million.

The referendum has also drawn opposition from two former GOP state attorneys general, as well as all four of Ohio’s living former governors—including Republicans John Kasich and Bob Taft.

Even some Republicans don’t seem that keen on the August vote. The bill only passed the Ohio legislature after months of foot-dragging from reluctant GOP leaders and heavy pressure from anti-abortion rights groups, in spite of a GOP supermajority in both chambers. Republican Governor Mike DeWine only came out in support after it had already been passed by the legislature after months of debate. And the Ohio Business Roundtable, a conservative-leaning coalition of business groups that usually works closely with Republicans, has decided to stay on the sidelines.

But the new law’s sponsors and their allies in the religious right and business community are now rallying to the cause. 

The Ohio Republican Party recently launched an effort aimed at turning out GOP base voters, and a coalition of pro-GOP business organizations headed by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce recently launched an operation to provide air support. Those groups largely back the amendment because they want to make it easier to defeat a 2024 constitutional amendment to raise the state’s minimum wage.

Given the GOP’s insistence that this is about keeping outside special interests from changing the state constitution, it’s ironic that the biggest individual donor so far to back the amendment is an Illinois billionaire. Dick Uihlein, a GOP megadonor and shipping supplies magnate who has a particular fondness for election deniers and social conservative causes, is the biggest donor behind Save Our Constitution, a super PAC that spent more than $1 million on ads badgering reluctant Republican state lawmakers into passing legislation to create the August vote.

The proposal doesn’t just increase the threshold needed for voters to pass constitutional amendments—it also makes it much harder for groups to get amendments in front of the voters. Currently, organizations and movements need to secure signatures from five percent of registered voters in 44 of the state’s 88 counties to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The new rule, if approved, would force groups to get enough signatures in every single county—and eliminate the 10-day cure period that currently exists for groups to fix any errors in signatures to qualify for the ballot.

If passed, the Aug. 8 measure would only apply to future constitutional amendments; it would not change the process that governs the initiatives that change regular statutes. Voters would still be able initiate laws or repeal ones passed by the legislature with a simple majority of the statewide vote. 

But state legislators can immediately re-pass the same or similar laws or repeal voter-backed legislation, giving them an effective veto over popular opinion.

The election is scheduled for the second Tuesday in August, where the proposed amendment will be the only question on the ballot. According to early reports, local election officials are scrambling to secure enough poll workers and polling locations in time. 

August elections are typically very low-turnout affairs, with between 5 and 10 percent of registered voters actually casting ballots. Both sides are gearing up to spend heavily on the race, and expect slightly higher turnout due to the gravity of the issue.

But the amendment’s opponents seem much more confident than its advocates.

“It’s gonna be a tough fight in August, and it’s really going to be about getting out the vote,” said Russo, the House minority leader. “But I feel confident that it will be defeated.” 

The post “An Attempt to Fool Voters”: Ohio GOP Sets Up Vote To Weaken Direct Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

But that didn’t stop Arkansas Republicans, who this month pushed through those same stricter ballot measure rules that voters rebuffed in 2020. This time, lawmakers simply packaged their proposal into a regular bill, which sidesteps another referendum to amend the state constitution, and Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed it into law on March 7.

“I think the ultimate goal is to make it harder for citizens to challenge what their government does,” Senator Bryan King, who opposed House Bill 1419, told Bolts. 

King is a Republican, one of three GOP lawmakers (out of 111) who joined Democrats in voting against the bill. Days later, King filed a lawsuit to block it alongside the League of Women Voters of Arkansas, an organization that defends voting rights in the state. Their complaint argues that HB 1419 violates the rules for the ballot initiative process that are laid out in detail in the state constitution. 

“We see this bill as an attack on direct democracy in Arkansas,” says Bonnie Miller, the league’s president. “To have them go into session, pass this bill because they lost, and just say, ‘We know that you didn’t want this, that you don’t want us to restrict the process, but we’re just gonna do it anyway’—it’s ridiculous,” she added.

Currently, organizers must collect signatures from no less than 15 of the state’s 75 counties, a requirement embedded in the state constitution. The 2020 proposal that voters rejected would have increased that threshold to 45 counties. HB 1419 increases it to 50 counties. This will require organizers to set up robust signature gathering operations across most of the state, significantly raising the amount of money and resources that citizen groups need to get an initiative on the ballot. 

“Even collecting signatures in 15 counties is wildly expensive, and so for them to increase the number of counties to 50, it’s going to shut out groups like ours,” says Miller. “We’re not going to be able to afford to do this.” 

David Crouch, an Arkansas attorney who helped jumpstart several initiatives like the successful 2014 medical marijuana measure, and who is now the lead counsel in the lawsuit against HB 1419, agrees. “The grassroots people are going to be screwed,” he said.

HB 1419 is part of a broader nationwide effort by Republican politicians to undercut ballot initiatives. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center has identified many such bills in recent years; when submitted to voters, like in South Dakota last spring, these changes are often defeated by dramatic margins. But the GOP has also pushed through bills to make the process of qualifying initiatives far more impractical, including imposing more onerous requirements for the geographic distribution of signatures gathered, which is the template that HB 1419 emulates. 

Most recently, Oklahoma’s governor chose to schedule a citizen-initiated referendum to legalize recreational weed in an unusual standalone special election, dampening turnout. The day after the measure lost, on March 8, Oklahoma’s GOP-run state Senate passed a bill that would make it easier to invalidate signatures in the future by mandating that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition (any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures). The bill now sits in the Oklahoma House. 

Even in this national context, the law Arkansas Republicans passed this month stands out for recycling a proposal that voters just recently rejected. But crafting HB 1419 as a regular bill to sidestep voter opposition only works as a legal maneuver if its changes to the ballot initiative process don’t require revising the constitution. 

To the bill’s critics, the fact that the state GOP first tried to change the signature requirements for ballot measures with a constitutional amendment in 2020 was acknowledgment that their proposal required one, and that an ordinary statute wouldn’t do. In fact, Republicans initially rebounded from their 2020 failure by drafting yet another constitutional amendment, one that would have forced future initiatives to receive 60 percent of the vote at the polls, rather than 50. Arkansans again rejected that measure overwhelmingly in November 2022, by 18 percentage points. 

David McAvoy, a progressive advocate who chaired the group Protect AR Voices when it helped fight off the 2020 amendment, is livid that the state is ignoring those repeat election results and calls the new law an unconstitutional “power grab.”

“They tried amending the constitution,” McAvoy says, “and now that the voters have rejected those attempts, they’re just saying, ‘Well, we’re just going to forget what the constitution says and just do whatever we want.’” 

The lawsuit against HB 1419 argues specifically that its requirements contradict those in the state constitution’s Article 5, which is the section that regulates the initiative process, and that lawmakers therefore needed to craft their proposal as a constitutional amendment like they did in 2020.

Article 5 states that an initiative must gather signatures “in at least 15 counties.” The lawsuit argues that this constitutional stipulation bars the legislature from passing a law requiring a higher threshold. The bill’s proponents have said this language merely sets “a floor” that lawmakers can raise. Crouch said in an interview that the words “at least” do not authorize lawmakers to  raise the threshold because those words needed to be there to clarify that organizers don’t need to pursue signatures from exactly 15 counties. (Case in point: Republicans deployed the same phrasing in HB 1419, which requires signatures from “at least 50 counties.”)

Crouch also points to Article 5’s final clause, which lays out what the legislature is allowed to do when it comes to toying with the rules: “All its provisions shall be treated as mandatory, but laws may be enacted to facilitate its operation. No legislation shall be enacted to restrict, hamper or impair the exercise of the rights herein reserved to the people.” For Crouch, HB 1419 plainly violates these bounds because raising the county threshold from 15 to 50 restricts the ballot initiative process.

“You can’t change the constitution with a bill,” Crouch said. “Facilitate means facilitate, and 15 means 15 and not 50.”

The chief sponsor of HB 1419, Representative Kendon Underwood, did not reply to a request for comment. 

Other Republicans who supported the change say the law will ensure that rural voters are heard. A spokesperson for the governor said Sanders signed the bill because she “wants to ensure all Arkansans, especially rural residents, have a voice in this process.” But King, who represents a Northwest Arkansas district, rejects that argument. “I’m a rural guy through and through, I represent rural counties,” he told Bolts. “This is making it harder for the citizens.”

HB 1419 poses a particular challenge to progressive proposals because Democratic-leaning counties tend to be more populous. Until now, progressive organizers needed to spread their work across 15 counties, and Joe Biden received 35 percent in Arkansas’s 15th bluest county in 2020; that’s nearly identical to his statewide result. But once they need 50 counties, they’ll have to find allies in far more conservative territory than even the state as a whole; Biden received just 20 percent of the vote in the state’s 50th bluest county.

The legislature added an “emergency” clause in HB 1419, so the changes take effect immediately. If upheld, it will affect several efforts that state advocates say are already in the works for 2024, such as the rerun of a 2020 proposal to implement an all-party primary coupled with ranked-choice voting—an initiative akin to what Alaska implemented last year. The proposal was set to make the ballot in 2020 but the Arkansas supreme court blocked it over its strict interpretation of a background-check requirement for canvassers gathering signatures. 

The fate of HB 1419 will also eventually come down to the state supreme court. In last year’s election, conservatives in Arkansas tried to push the state supreme court further to the right by targeting two justices who have a moderate reputation. Both incumbents secured re-election, though, and are likely to be on the court if it hears the case against the new law or any other restrictions, as the legislature could still escalate its war on direct democracy in the remainder of the session. 

On March 10, three days after HB 1419 was signed into law, Republican Representative David Ray filed HB 1601, a new proposal that would require that the canvassers who are hired by organizations to collect signatures first obtain a special license. The bill would ratchet up the costs and bureaucracy associated with the process, just as HB 1419 has required organizations to hire significantly more canvassers given they’ll need to spread in many more counties.

Crouch expects even more attacks on ballot initiatives. “They just feel like they are in power to do whatever they want to do,” he said. “They don’t care anything about the constitution, unless it’s a gun.”

The post “An Attack on Direct Democracy in Arkansas”  appeared first on Bolts.

State Question 820 lost overwhelmingly, 62 to 38 percent. It trails in all Oklahoma counties, and the state’s rural areas rejected it by especially large margins.

In the five years since voters approved a measure to legalize medical marijuana, Oklahoma has seen an explosion in cannabis farms and dispensaries. Some business owners are making a fortune. 

But possession and sale outside of those strictures remains a criminal offense. An estimated 60,000 Oklahomans are weighed down by a past marijuana conviction and the number keeps climbing, with 5,000 people arrested over marijuana possession in 2020 alone, according to state data. 

“At a time when the state has legal marijuana millionaires, it seems both unjust and imprudent for there to be so many people who can’t get a job and can’t put food on the table for low-level marijuana convictions,” Damion Shade, executive director of OK Justice Reform, told Bolts. 

Had it passed, SQ 820 would have enabled these people to seek an expungement of their criminal records. Providing retroactive relief has become a staple of legalization efforts around the nation, since the effects of a conviction extend far beyond the sentence, affecting people’s ability to secure employment, housing, or college grants. And Black Oklahomans disproportionately suffer these repercussions; an ACLU study found that between 2010 and 2018, Black people were four times more likely to be arrested over marijuana than white people.

Organizers intended to qualify SQ 820 for the state’s November 2022 ballot. But challenges delayed approval and kicked it off to 2023. Then, Republican governor Kevin Stitt scheduled the referendum for March 7—a special election where SQ 820 would stand on its own—even though Oklahomans were already set to go to the polls on both Feb. 14 and April 4 for local and school board races. 

This left the state with a confusing schedule of three separate election days—each with their periods of mail-in ballots and early voting—within eight weeks.

“People can’t rearrange child care and jobs every month to go vote,” says Andy Moore, CEO of Let’s Fix This, an organization that promotes civic engagement in Oklahoma. “Doing it like this was clearly a way to suppress turnout.” 

While Oklahoma routinely sees some of the worst voter turnout in the nation (it was the lowest of any state in the 2020 presidential election), participation on Tuesday paled even in comparison to that low bar. Roughly 560,000 people voted in Tuesday’s election, 25 percent of registered voters and less than 20 percent of the total voting-eligible population in the state. 

When Oklahomans voted on medical marijuana in June of 2018, alongside the state’s primaries, nearly 900,000 people voted; turnout on Tuesday was 37 percent lower. 

“If we really want to get an assessment of what the voters want, we need to help them to the polls,” Moore told Bolts. “We can do things to make elections more accessible to more people so that we can have higher turnout.”

The governor who scheduled the election opposes legalizing marijuana and called on voters to defeat SQ 820, as did other prominent Republicans who said it would endanger the state. “I believe this is the best thing to keep our kids safe and for our state as a whole,” Stitt said on Twitter on Tuesday after the result was known.

Some Oklahoma Republicans are pushing changes to the ballot initiative process that could guarantee an odd placement on the calendar, lending credence to complaints that state officials are intentionally seeking to dampen turnout in those elections. 

One measure, introduced by Senator Warren Hamilton, would mandate that initiatives only go to voters in odd-numbered years, rather than on even-numbered years where turnout is far higher. The proposal goes against the burgeoning movement nationwide to move more elections to even-years in order to sync them with higher-turnout national election cycles and champion higher engagement.

Hamilton’s proposal is now technically dead because it did not survive a legislative deadline last week, though Moore warns that measures can always be revived by legislative leaders or poured into other legislative vehicles late into the session. But another measure, Senate Bill 518, is still alive. Introduced by Senator Julie Daniels, it would make it trickier to qualify a ballot initiative, doubling the time window for someone to challenge petitions and making it easier to invalidate signatures. The legislation would mandate that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition, raising the prospect that any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures.

Moore warns that this change would add to what he calls an “already totally bogus” verification process. Oklahoma officials drew complaints last year when they decided to outsource signature verification to a private vendor, claiming the authority to do so by invoking a new law, even if many legislators say they did not mean it to authorize outsourcing, The Journal Record reported last year. 

SB 518, which passed a Senate committee in February, is scheduled to be heard on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning. 

Daniels and Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment about their respective bills. 

Republicans nationwide have retaliated against popular initiatives they oppose by championing an avalanche of measures that make it far harder for organizers to gather signatures to get them on the ballot. In Oklahoma, voters approved a number of ballot measures in recent years that circumvented conservative lawmakers, including medical marijuana in 2018 and Medicaid expansion in 2020. 

SQ 820 won’t add to that list, however. Besides making marijuana more accessible in the state, the measure would have raised revenue off of a 15 percent excise tax on the sale of marijuana that would have funded public schools and addiction treatment programs.

The expungement provision would have given tens of thousands of people the option to clear their records, though it would not have made that process automatic. Last year, for convictions that were already eligible for expungement in Oklahoma (marijuana is not among those), the state adopted a “Clean Slate” law that will lift the need for people to file a burdensome petition for relief. 

Shade, of OK Justice Reform, helped champion that “Clean Slate” law, which he says did not modify the criteria as to which offenses are eligible to be expunged—it only made the existing process automatic. With SQ 820’s failure, he says, he hopes to persuade state politicians to pass a bill to at least allow marijuana convictions to be expunged, which at least some Republicans seem to be open to. “It’s my goal to reach out to stakeholders and begin figuring out what type of legislative success we have going after this,” he said.

The post Oklahomans Reject Recreational Weed in Low-Turnout Election appeared first on Bolts.

Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.

But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.

It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)

Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.

“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles. 

The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race. 

“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.

Bie Lie figures have been wildly successful in radicalizing people who previously trusted standard elections procedures. But their efforts have also made the broader electorate pay far more attention to once-obscure matters of election administration. Secretary of state races this year drew record spending, especially on the Democratic side.

Advocates in Arizona say this new context prepared many to more carefully consider proposed changes to voting rules than they may have in the past.

“I think that the population is a lot more interested in what used to be pretty dry, bureautic understandings of the way ballots are processed and the way election security is run,” said Gonski, who is now a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government. “They’re paying attention and they’re interested to know so much more about elections and the way they work, and that does a huge amount for people understanding how secure our elections actually are.”

J.D. Mesnard, the Republican state senator who authored Proposition 309, has defended his proposals in recent years by saying that lawmakers should address people’s concerns about fraud even if there is no underlying evidence for them. In an interview with Bolts, he echoed the analysis that Arizonans voted down his initiative as part of rejecting efforts to revisit the 2020 election. 

“To the extent that anybody sees bills focused on improving the integrity and security of our elections, and thinks the only reason you’re running them is because of the 2020 election, this all gets tangled up with people’s sentiments about President Trump and 2020,” he said. 

Mesnard added that his frustration is with Democrats, not Trump: “I’m not trying to place blame on him; don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The opposition did a relatively consistent job of saying this is all feeding into the quote-unquote Big Lie.”

Then there’s the fact that Proposition 309 was a notably harsh voter ID law. It was more restrictive than the measures passed in the last decade in Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma. And it zipped far beyond the voter ID law Arizona adopted in 2004.

The measure would have required anyone voting in person to use a photo ID: This would have eliminated voters’ current ability to present two documents as alternatives to a photo ID—say, a bank statement, lease agreement, or utility bill. 

It would also have made it harder for Arizonans to vote by mail, a widespread approach to voting there. Ballotpedia found at least 75 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in every general election between 2014 and 2020. Proposition 309 would have added more requirements for mail voters: They would have also had to fill out and enclose an affidavit including their driver’s license or ID card number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or a unique registration number assigned to them by the state’s elections office.

The state has enabled voting by mail since the early 1990s. By 2007, when the legislature created a permanent early voting roll, “Arizona had so many people voting by mail that we literally couldn’t keep up with the applications,” Patrick said.

She added, “Arizonans have been doing this for a long time, and they love to do it, until and unless you have a presidential candidate, and then an incumbent president, suggesting voting by mail is fraudulent.”

Patrick, who now works as co-CEO of The Election Center, the national organization representing state and local elections officials, said Arizonans have had a long time to observe that stricter voter ID requirements don’t just ensnare fraudsters. Not everyone has an identification card, and some who do have ID that lacks a photo or an address.

“These are people saying, ‘I voted for that proposition in 2004, but I didn’t think it would affect me because it was just about fraud and it was just going to affect those other people,’” Patrick said. “Arizonans remember that, and they know that you can be a valid, eligible voter and not have an ID that is required under these specific types of laws.”

Native voters would have felt the brunt of the burdens proposed under Proposition 309, The Arizona Republic documented in October. Many tribes use identity cards that lack photos or home addresses, or otherwise don’t line up with state government standards.

“The reality for Native Americans who don’t have the same type of access to services whether it is the government, or any other things, this just needlessly complicates our ability to vote,” Kris Beecher, a lawyer in Arizona who is a member of the Navajo Nation, told The Republic. Nationwide analyses show that voter ID laws burden more people of color and reduce their participation.

That was of primary concern for groups that advocate for tribal communities, said Angela Willeford, intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“We’re nonpartisan, but we said ‘vote no on 309’, and we never do that typically,” she told Bolts. 

Arizona Republicans likely won’t be able to pass new statutes restricting voting rights for at least the next four years; the governor’s office flipped blue last month for the first time since 2009, handing Democrat Katie Hobbs a veto pen. But the GOP still controls the legislature, and lawmakers could vote again to place a measure like Proposition 309 directly on the ballot, circumventing Hobbs. Mesnard told Bolts he isn’t sure it will. 

Since their defeat, Republicans like Lake and Finchem have fanned false conspiracies about the results and some lawmakers have signaled they will take up the issue.

But Patrick said state and local elections administrators in Arizona are doing more public education than ever around how elections are run, and said she’s heartened that journalistic outlets are dedicating more resources to the elections beat. 

“We used to lament about toiling away in obscurity,” the former Maricopa County official said.

Opponents of 309 prevailed narrowly, but in defeating the measure, Gonski believes, “The people of Arizona started to say that we’re not prepared to give up easier access to democracy in exchange for more heightened security checks on top of what we have. They started to say, enough.”

The post In Rejecting Voter ID Measure, Arizonans Bucked History and Surprised Advocates  appeared first on Bolts.