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.

On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” contractor, shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement. “I don’t want to have to be doing this today, but direct action and civil disobedience are the only options we have left.” Both activists were arrested and jailed.

In a way, the movement was returning to its roots. In 2021, the fight to stop Cop City began with direct action. After two years of protest, organizers extended their effort to the ballot box. Some felt it was critical to let Atlantans weigh in directly on the construction of a vast new law enforcement training center—and they were betting that the will of the people would ultimately come down on their side. On a more practical level, a referendum campaign struck Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the Cop City vote coalition, as a straightforward process with delineated steps and rules: a signature collection phase, a break while the city verified them, then on to a massive voter turnout effort. “We were like, ‘This seems very clear in terms of the path that we need to be walking on,’” she recalled. 

As it turns out, the path has been anything but clear. The Atlanta city government has thrown up barriers at every turn, miring the petition gathering and signature approval process in bureaucratic and legal delays. The city has even drawn the ire of mainstream Democratic politicians and voting rights groups in its attempts to deploy classic forms of voter restriction. 

These roadblocks were made possible by the fact that the organizers are essentially starting from zero. Atlanta has never hosted a citizen-led referendum before, and therefore has few established structures in place to govern the process. “So much of what happened over the course of the past two years was entirely preventable, had we had a codified process that allowed everyone to know what the rules of the game were,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder and executive director of Atlanta’s Center for Civic Innovation.

Since last September, Malhotra and others have sought to address this conundrum by drafting local legislation that would clarify the referendum process, now and for the future. That, too, has been met with interference from the mayor’s office. On Monday, the Atlanta city council finally passed legislation codifying rules and regulations for a referendum. But not before an 11th hour substitution that reintroduced signature matching, a form of verification that national voting rights groups have decried as burdensome and discriminatory. “Our ask was simple—we just wanted you to protect democracy.” Malhotra said during public comment this week. “This body has continued to break its word and to break our hearts.”

Now, as the Stop Cop City movement continues to wait for a federal appeals court to hand down a decision about the legality of the petition gathering process, there are still 16 boxes of five month-old signatures sitting untouched in City Hall. But, amidst this uncertainty, external deadlines are fast approaching. The referendum was originally supposed to appear on last November’s ballot, and it’s already too late for this year’s March presidential primary election, too. Organizers are now debating whether to aim for the ballot in May, when local primaries happen, or wait until November, when the presidential election might force Democrats nationally to weigh in on the fight, given Georgia’s battleground status. If the decision comes late enough, and city officials keep stalling, the choice may be made for them.

“If the city of Atlanta was really invested in elevating the voices of its residents, they would at least be ready,” said Analilia Mejia, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a national network of 50 organizations, three of which are local to Atlanta, that is supporting the referendum effort “They wouldn’t be running a clock.” 

From the beginning, Cop City has revealed the fault lines present in Atlanta’s system of representative democracy. Organizers started talking about the possibility of a popular referendum as early as September 2021. That was the month the city council first decided, over strenuous public opposition, to turn hundreds of acres of land in Atlanta’s South River Forest over to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which planned to build a massive training center for law enforcement and first responders—replete with a mock city to practice quelling street protests, an explosives test site, and multiple gun ranges. “By September (2021) it is clear that there’s organized money and organized special interests pushing this,” said Mejia. “It then becomes clear to us that we need organized people and some organized money to counter it.”

After almost two years of protest, the push to bring Cop City to a public vote came to fruition. In June 2023, in an echo of the 2021 meeting, the council voted to allocate tens of millions in public funds toward the training center—again, after hours of public comment, most of it against the measure. The coalition announced the referendum campaign the following day. 

Atlanta’s city charter gave Stop Cop City organizers 60 days to collect more than 58,000 signatures from city voters in order to get on the November ballot, a challenge in itself. But, almost immediately, the city started to stonewall. The city clerk delayed the beginning of the petition process by quibbling over the petition’s formatting, and in August, city officials announced that Atlanta would implement “signature matching”—the process of comparing a person’s signature on the petition to the one on file for them in state voter records. 

Signature matching has been used in many states for other voting practices, like authenticating absentee ballots. But it is widely considered to be an unnecessarily onerous form of verification that disproportionately excludes votes from people of color, English language learners, and the elderly and disabled. Atlanta’s decision to implement signature matching drew wide condemnation, including from Democratic leaders like Senator Raphael Warnock and voting rights groups founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.

The city has also fought organizers on who can collect signatures. After residents in unincorporated areas of Dekalb County sued the city—arguing they were unfairly excluded from the petition drive despite living near the proposed training center site—a federal judge ruled in their favor. The judge’s order immediately expanded residency requirements for canvassers and restarted the 60-day timeline to gather signatures. The coalition says it delivered some 116,000 signatures in September (nearly double what they need to get on the ballot), but the city appealed and has refused to tally them and move forward with the referendum process until a federal appeals court issues its opinion. 

As they wait for the court’s decision, Stop Cop City Vote organizers have found themselves in limbo. “There’s a lot that I want to do and would like to be doing versus going back and forth with the city with something that should be so simple,” said Hooks. “We’re here for the long game struggle,” she went on, but acknowledged that the delays have taken a toll on some: “I know it’s been very disappointing and demoralizing in a lot of ways.” 

One antidote to this frustration was to start work on the proposal to codify a referendum procedure—a parallel track that doesn’t affect the court’s decision, but would jumpstart the process if the court rules in the organizers’ favor. 

The draft ordinance, crafted with the help of national voting rights lawyer Marc Elias and first introduced by Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari in January, laid out procedures for reviewing the referendum petitions. Crucially, it aimed to preclude signature matching, which Malhotra called “non-negotiable.” Instead, the ordinance proposed a “curing” process to resolve inconsistencies, like the accidental omission of a middle name, that can trigger a signature invalidation.

But on Monday, two council members—including one who represents the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, which has in the past sought to secede from the rest of Atlanta and where many residents firmly support the construction of Cop City—forced language into the legislation that outlines a process for a version of signature matching. After Malhotra spoke for 10 minutes, imploring the city council to amend the legislation to remove signature matching, the body approved the ordinance anyway by a 10-5 vote. By then, the legislation had changed so much that Bakhtiari voted against it. 

Chaos ensued, with organizers, including Mary Hooks, occupying the dais to protest the last-minute change. “We see continuously the city betraying everyday people and our right to vote on issues that matter to us,” she told the room.

A federal appeals court ruling in the city’s favor could derail the referendum process even further. The city could argue that since the lower court’s earlier decision expanding the timeframe for people to collect signatures was overturned, the circumstances of their collection are now simply invalid—though Malhotra says such a decision would make the city look even worse. “I don’t think the mayor or the council, or the city in general, benefits from winning on a technicality,” Malhotra said. “For them to be like: ‘Well, I know we have these hundred and whatever thousand signatures but now we’re going to burn them’—I think that that’s just a politically silly thing for them to do.”
“But I don’t hold it beyond them,” he added. 

If the court rules in favor of the coalition, an entirely new scramble will ensue. Per its charter, the city has 50 days to stand up a referendum process. That’s where the new ordinance comes in. With more than 100,000 signatures collected, coalition members say they’re confident that they will cross the threshold even if some signatures are thrown out. But the verification process could still present issues. An analysis by the Associated Press and several local news outlets found a high number of seemingly invalid signatures. If the petition is approved despite these challenges, the question will then be whether to vote on it in May or November.

Many onlookers have struggled to understand why the city has invested so much energy and risked so much bad press in continuing to block a vote. “I cannot understand how the home of King and Lewis has the audacity to fight basic democratic process for any other reason than they are scared to lose,” said Malhotra. “From day one, this has been a process and procedure failure—and rather than addressing that underlying challenge, I think they underestimated the public’s appetite for transparency on process and procedure, and overestimated and overplayed their hand on trying to turn this into a binary conversation about policing and public safety.”

While legislation codifying a referendum process has passed, albeit with signature-matching included, there’s still no telling when the federal appeals court decision may come. In the meantime, there will be more direct actions. “Folks have said, like, ‘Hey, while we’re waiting and the referendum’s in limbo, and we still gonna give our elected officials the smoke—these corporations are also not going to be let off the hook,’” Hooks said. “We’re not going to lay the direct action component of this fight down just because the state repression is coming.” 

Sixty-one Cop City activists have been indicted for violating Georgia’s RICO act, and some 42 of them also have pending domestic terrorism charges. This week, state and federal law enforcement officers raided several Cop City opponents’ homes, taking at least two people into custody and reportedly refusing to show arrest warrants. 

On February 6, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill mandating cash bail for offenses like racketeering, domestic terrorism, criminal trespass, and “unlawful assembly.” It would also drastically limit bail funds’ ability to bond out protestors like Hooks and others who affixed themselves to construction vehicles on January 29. “On Monday when I left home,” Hooks recalled, “my wife was like, ‘Please come back. Please come back.’”

The post Faced with ‘Cop City’ Referendum Push, Atlanta Changes Up Its Election Rules appeared first on Bolts.

After court rulings in December struck down several states’ electoral maps, from Michigan to New York, what districts will millions of people even vote in later this year? How prepared will local election offices be after suffering harassment for years? Will the Voting Rights Act (VRA) still stand as a tool for civil rights litigation in the wake of an ominous ruling that came in late 2023? Who will even be running elections in North Carolina and Wisconsin, two swing states that are experiencing an intense power struggle?

Our team at Bolts has identified a dozen key questions that will shape voting rights and democracy this year. This is born less of a desire to be comprehensive than to offer a preliminary roadmap for our own coverage.

That’s because, while some questions that matter to 2024 will come down to federal decisions—likely starting with decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on Donald Trump’s prosecutions and presence on the ballot, and on the VRA’s fate—a lot will hinge on the policies and politics of state and local governments: your county clerk in charge of organizing Election Day, your county board that decides where to put ballot drop boxes, your lawmakers tweaking the rules of ballot initiatives, your secretary of state wielding the power to certify results. (Be sure to explore our state-by-state resources on who runs our elections and who counts our elections.) 

These are the officials we will be tracking throughout the year to help us clarify the local landscape of voting rights and access to democracy during a critical election year. 

1. How will federal courts affect voting rights and the 2024 election?

A maelstrom of major legal cases on voting rights and the 2024 election are currently working their way through the legal system, and many are heading straight toward the nation’s highest court.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS is set to hear several cases that will affect one presidential candidate: Donald Trump. The first is whether Trump will be allowed to appear on the ballot in several states. Colorado’s state supreme court disqualified him from the primary ballot in late December, ruling he was ineligible due to the Fourteenth Amendment because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6. (Maine’s secretary of state came to a similar conclusion one week later.) Trump has appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices have not yet announced whether and when they will hear the cases; their ruling is likely to also shape how other states do, amid the former president’s protests that his removal would unduly disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court could also decide at least five other cases that touch Trump, including the shape of his Atlanta trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.

Also keep an eye on: SCOTUS may decide any major litigation that emerges in the aftermath of the November elections. But it’s also set to consider plenty of non-Trump voting rights cases this year, including several that may further gut the VRA. One devastating blow for the landmark civil rights law may come from a case out of Arkansas, where a federal appeals court ruled that private groups and individuals cannot bring VRA challenges. If the Supreme Court upholds this ruling, legal experts say it would make the law largely unenforceable. As the VRA continues to be weakened, some states have adopted state-level voting rights acts to reinforce its principles; debate may resume in Michigan and New Jersey this year over such legislation.

Federal appeals courts have also recently rejected other VRA claims, including in a case in which civil rights groups in Georgia challenged the state’s election system for its public utility commission as racially discriminatory. If the high court upholds the ruling, it would have major implications for the statewide elected utility commission in neighboring Alabama as well.

2. How will state election maps change by November?

Nearly four years after the decennial census that kicks off redistricting, election maps across the country remain in flux, and major legal and political battles are set to unfold this year. At stake is not just who will have power in each state, but also whether people get to vote under fair maps.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans enjoy large legislative majorities that are effectively election-proof thanks to their gerrymandered maps, but 2023 began to unravel their hold on power. Liberals flipped the state’s supreme court in April after a heated campaign during which Janet Protasiewicz, the winning candidate, called the legislative maps “rigged.” And in late December, the court issued a 4-3 ruling, with liberals in the majority, striking down the legislative maps.

But there’s still a long way to go before voters can get fairer maps in November. The court set up a process to draw new remedial maps, but left the door open for lawmakers to try first. The state’s GOP speaker has largely backed off his earlier threats to impeach Protasiewicz but still has not ruled it out. And Democratic groups must decide whether they’ll also sue over the congressional map and whether to do so in state court.

Also keep an eye on: A federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a new congressional map by late January to stop diluting the power of Black voters, but lawmakers may stall. Michigan needs to redraw its legislative maps after another federal ruling found that 13 districts violated the Voting Rights Act. New York is also in the midst of a fresh round of congressional redistricting after Democrats won a court battle in December, though it remains to be seen whether the process ends up producing minor tweaks or an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. And from Texas to Florida, there’s still active litigation in many states alleging that maps are unlawful. 

3. How well will local election officials and offices be prepared to handle the election?

The country’s elections workforce has been decimated in the past few years, amid a deluge of threats and harassment stemming from coordinated efforts by some Republicans to attack and undermine local and state administrators, as well as funding challenges. The capacity of these local offices will now be seriously tested in 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

Nevada has suffered acutely since 2020 from election-worker brain-drain. Not a week into 2024, these woes have already deepened: Jamie Rodriguez, the elections chief in Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Rodriguez’s predecessor, Deanna Spikula, herself stepped down in 2022 after some residents smeared her as a “traitor” and threatened her office. In an interview with Bolts last year, Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, warned of where he sees this all heading: “If we don’t take care of the human component,” he said, “these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Also keep an eye on: Election officials have similarly resigned en masse in recent years in many states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, leading many to worry about the amount of experience lost. And while election workers are crucial, so is election infrastructure. Aging voting equipment presents a projected multi-billion-dollar problem. Look to Louisiana, for example, to see why this is worth worrying about: That state’s voting machines are nearly 20 years old. They break down often and, when they do, elections administrators struggle to obtain the parts to fix them. One local elections chief told Bolts her office is “barely hanging on”— a statement many of her counterparts around the country have echoed.

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

It’s tough enough for election offices to prepare for the 2024 cycle amid all the personal overhaul they’ve experienced since 2024. But in some of the nation’s most important battleground states, election rules and administrators are in limbo going into this critical year. 

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe became a target for right-wing conspiracists in the wake of the 2020 election, and GOP lawmakers resolved to oust her last year. After a complicated set of maneuvers, Senate Republicans voted to remove her from the position in September, but a judge later ruled that vote had no legal effect for now. Wolfe has not stepped down from her position even though her term has technically expired. This political and legal imbroglio has created huge uncertainty over who will actually administer Wisconsin’s elections this year. Adding to the limbo: Wisconsinites in April will elect some of the local officials who will then run the state’s August and November elections. 

Also keep an eye on: North Carolina Republicans were primed to oust the director of the state’s State Elections Board, Karen Brinson Bell, thanks to a new law they passed last year. The law changed the structure of the board so that it no longer has a Democratic majority, instead creating an even split between parties, and it entrusted the GOP legislature with resolving ties; this would likely set up Republicans to oust Bell and usher in new leadership. But a state court in late November blocked the law in a preliminary ruling, a legal dispute set to resolve this year. 

5. What happens if any election officials try to stall or halt certification?

After losing the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump asked state and local officials to stall or stop the election’s certification, hoping to overturn state results and convince his congressional allies to accept his slates of fake electors. If Trump loses the presidential race again this fall and repeats that strategy, would he find allies who are willing to disrupt the process and have the authority to stop it? Be sure to bookmark our nationwide resource on who counts elections since answering this difficult question requires a keen understanding of the mechanisms of power in every state, which Bolts will track throughout 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

The recent revelation by the Detroit News that Trump personally pressured members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers in 2020 was no surprise given what was already known of his actions that year. But it was a reminder of the critical role these local bodies play in Michigan: Boards of canvassers are divided equally between parties, which leaves Democrats particularly vulnerable to shenanigans in a populous stronghold like Wayne. 

Since 2020, the Michigan GOP has replaced their local election officials with people who have defended subverting elections. Republicans on the statewide board of canvassers have also shown they’re willing to go along with such maneuvers. Still, Michigan has new legal standards clarifying that canvassers lack the discretion to reject valid results; in 2022, Democrats defended their majority on the state supreme court, the body that would be called on to enforce such standards.

Also keep an eye on: Election deniers lost most of their bids to take power in swing states in 2022, but there are plenty of other spots to watch. Officials with a history of delaying election certification won reelection last year in Pennsylvania, though Democrats solidified their hold on the state’s supreme court. Trump allies will run local election offices in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia, heightening the potential for havoc. And a fake Trump elector from 2020 has a seat on the Wisconsin Election Commission, the body that runs elections in a key battleground state.

6. How easy will it be for voters to vote by mail?

If you want to vote by mail in this year’s elections, will you need to provide an excuse to get an absentee ballot? Will you have easy access to a drop box to drop off your ballot? What are the odds your mail ballot gets tossed on a technicality? That all depends on your state, the bills your lawmakers are crafting, and may even hinge on the decisions of your local government. 

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s most decentralized systems when it comes to mail voting procedures. As Bolts reported this fall, county officials there have a startling amount of discretion on how to deal with deficient ballots, whether to install drop boxes, and even whether to have armed law enforcement guarding them. Democratic wins in November’s local elections are likely to preserve the status quo in the most populous counties. But democracy advocates are pushing for better procedures on how voters can fix mistakes, and more robust requirements for drop boxes; they’ll be waging this battle both statewide and county by county throughout 2024.

Also keep an eye on: Since the 2020 presidential race saw an explosion of mail voting during the pandemic, many states have revised their rules—some to make it harder, others to expand its availability. The 2024 cycle will be the biggest test yet for how these laws impact turnout. For instance, Democrats in Michigan this year passed new laws that make it easier to vote by mail and set new requirements for drop boxes. Inversely, Georgia Republicans’ restrictions on mail voting, adopted in 2021, just survived their latest court challenge in October. In Mississippi, a new state law that criminalizes helping people with absentee voting is currently blocked by a federal court ruling. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Democrats are hoping that their new majority on the state supreme court enables voters to use ballot drop boxes, a practice the state disallowed in 2022.

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

By requiring citizens to register to vote, states have erected a barrier between voters and the act of voting. But some have pushed boundaries in recent years, finding ways of shifting the burden of registration onto the state or eliminating unnecessary deadlines or paperwork, with some proposals questioning whether we need registration at all. This will be another critical year to watch how states ease or curtail access to this fundamental right.

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

Almost half of states allow voters to register on the day of an election—a major convenience for any of the countless people in those states who may otherwise have missed a deadline. Liberal as it is, New Jersey is not among the states with this option, mainly because of opposition from its Democratic state Senate president. The state is weighing the policy afresh this year.

Also keep an eye on: Oregon and Colorado have been badgering the Biden administration for years to allow states to automatically register people to vote when they sign-up for Medicaid; if the feds acted on this,  hundreds of thousands of people would be registered to vote. Other states are considering new laws that would set up or expand automatic voter registration, including applying it to new state agencies, including Ohio, where organizers are pushing for a November initiative; and California, where proposed legislation would likely end up with more people on voter rolls; as well as Maryland and New Jersey, where progressives hope to copy Michigan’s recent first-in-the-nation move to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison.

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

Each state sets its own laws governing whether—and to what extent—people with previous felony convictions lose voting rights, and the national landscape on this front is ever-changing; 2023 alone saw landmark voting rights restoration in New Mexico and Minnesota, plus dramatic rollbacks in Virginia and Tennessee. The United States has long stood out among democracies worldwide for how aggressively it denies voting rights to people with criminal records, and that won’t change in 2024: an estimated 4 million citizens will be blocked from the ballot, but upcoming legal cases and political decisions could affect that number.

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

A panel of judges on the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court issued a shock decision last summer that struck down Mississippi’s extraordinarily harsh disenfranchisement rules, which strip hundreds of thousands of people of their voting rights for life. (An estimated 11 percent of the state’s adult population can’t vote, currently a national record.) But when the state appealed that panel ruling, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider it, voiding the prior decision and setting up a major legal showdown this year. If plaintiffs win again, it would bring about one of the most significant expansions of the franchise in a given state in recent history. But don’t bank on that, as voting rights advocates have been bracing for defeat.

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

Virginia Democrats have been sharply critical of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to reverse his predecessors’ policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Having just seized control of the legislature, they say they’ll now look to bypass Youngkin by referring to voters a constitutional amendment to remove rights restoration power from the governor’s office. That process would take multiple years to reach the ballot, though.

Also keep an eye on: Progressives in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon hope to go further and altogether eliminate felony disenfranchisement this session, enabling anyone to vote from prison. (This is already law in Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.). Inversely, Tennessee stepped up restrictions on rights restoration in 2023, and now requires people to pay new application fees; 2024 will be the new system’s first major test.

9. Will sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials step up policing and intimidation around elections?  

Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired right-wing officials across the country to launch special law enforcement units to root out and punish election crimes. They also fueled crackdowns in states where GOP officials had spread the myth of widespread voter fraud long before Trump, leading to a raft of laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing penalties around voting. Some GOP law enforcement officials have partnered with far-right election denier groups that are ramping up their own efforts to police voting ahead of Trump’s attempt at re-election. 

The stakes are clear in: Texas

Bolts reported last year that the elected sheriff and DA in Texas’ Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, were launching a new law enforcement task force to investigate and prosecute voter fraud. Phil Sorrells, the DA, ran with Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and won on promises to ratchet up policing of elections. The sheriff, Bill Waybourn, has become a right-wing celebrity for his fealty to Trump while also facing mounting criticism at home for a spike in deaths and other scandals at the county jail he oversees. 

Political pressure over baseless claims of fraud have already disrupted the running of elections in Fort Worth; Tarrant County’s widely respected elections chief stepped down last year after months of harassment from election deniers, which included racist attacks about his heritage. And election deniers have claimed without evidence that Waybourn’s close reelection win in 2020 suggests there was fraud. (Waybourn is up for reelection again this year.) That all sets the stage for even more allegations and investigations in a county with a long history of harsh and questionable prosecutions for voter fraud during a critical election year.

Also keep an eye on:  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 established the country’s first statewide agency dedicated solely to investigating election crimes, which quickly resulted in a series of arrests of people with prior felony convictions accused of voting illegally—many of whom have said the government had told them they could vote and whose prosecutions have since fizzled. Bolts has also reported how sheriffs in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin have bolstered election conspiracies and partnered with leading purveyors of election conspiracies to increase policing of elections. 

10. Where, and how, will the assault on direct democracy continue?

Many Republican-run states have curtailed the ballot initiative process in recent years, looking to limit citizens’ ability to put new issues on the ballot. After the GOP failed to derail an abortion rights initiative in Ohio in August, Bolts hosted a roundtable with democracy organizers who all said they expected the assault on direct democracy to continue unabated in 2024, fueled by conservative efforts to protect abortion bans and fight off redistricting reforms.

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

Reproductive rights advocates have turned to the only tool at their disposal in red states: directly asking voters to protect abortion rights. In Missouri, organizers have already had to fight off their attorney general’s effort to sabotage such a measure. In 2024, they’ll also have to contend with GOP proposals to change the rules and make it harder for voters to approve initiatives. One bill, filed by a GOP lawmaker for the 2024 session, would create a new requirement for initiatives to receive a majority in half of the state’s congressional districts in order to pass. Because the state’s map is gerrymandered to favor Republicans, this would force a progressive ballot initiative to carry at least one district that’s far more conservative than the state at large—a tall order for the abortion rights measure to meet. 

Also keep an eye on: Republicans are eying changes to state law in other states like Oklahoma to block abortion rights measures. In Arkansas, where the GOP passed a law last year that made it much more difficult to get a measure on the ballot, the coming year will test what space the law has left for organizing efforts. And democracy advocates in Idaho and Ohio expect Republicans to look for new maneuvers to restrict the initiative process.

11. What will happen to DAs and judges targeted for removal in southern states? 

Conservative officials in southern states have in recent years created, expanded, or ratcheted up the use of state powers to oust local DAs who make policies they disagree with—such as declining certain low-level charges or ruling out abortion prosecution. They have also targeted high-court judges over their decisions and statements.

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

Republican anger toward local prosecutors reached a fever pitch in Georgia last year with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ decision to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Bolts reported, Georgia Republicans established a new board with authority to oust DAs over their charging decisions, though the law has so far been tied up in court. Similarly, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered a near total criminal abortion ban in Texas, GOP lawmakers there pushed through legislation expanding powers to oust local DAs who said they would refuse to prosecute abortion and other cases, a law that may be turned against some local officials this year. 

Also keep an eye on: Florida, where the governor has broad power to remove and replace local elected officials, DeSantis has ousted two local prosecutors over the past two years, and voters will get to weigh in on who should occupy those offices for the first time since. Residents of St. Louis will also vote for the first time since the removal of their elected prosecutor by the Republicans in the Missouri state government. And Tennessee Republicans have stepped up efforts to sideline Memphis’ new Democratic DA. There are similar efforts to target judges, like the only Black woman justice on North Carolina’s supreme court, for removal. 

12. How will localities innovate to boost participation in democracy and local elections?  

Even as some places tried to make voting more difficult, 2023 also saw many states and cities experiment with new strategies to expand the franchise and encourage more participation in democracy. This year’s elections will see some of the first fruits of those efforts, as well as other places possibly following suit. 

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

Boston’s city council in December passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, a landmark win for progressives who’ve championed this issue locally for years, as Bolts reported in 2022. But the Massachusetts legislature would need to authorize Boston’s reform, which may come to a head this year. Boston’s move comes as other cities have adopted noncitizen voting. Last year, Burlington became the latest Vermont locality to allow noncitizen voting in local elections, giving more members of the state’s growing immigrant communities a say in things like school boards and municipal budgets. Washington, D.C. passed a similar ordinance last year, though a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the measure, a battle likely to continue into this year.

Also keep an eye on: Other innovations to increase participation are set to take effect this year, and will face their first tests. Michigan allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday,  while New York passed a law requiring high schools to distribute registration and pre-registration forms to students. Colorado and Nevada recently expanded voting access on Tribal lands. New York also just moved some local elections to even years to boost turnout, a reform that may inspire proposals in other states on an issue that is gaining steam around the nation.

Correction: The article has been corrected to reflect where Trump appealed his disqualification from the Maine ballot.

The post Twelve Questions Shaping Democracy and Voting Rights in 2024 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.

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.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

Instead Arizona’s ballot will feature a trio of measures that would significantly undercut direct democracy and future initiatives. All were referred to voters by the GOP-run legislature.

The coalition behind the voting rights initiative, Arizona for Fair Elections, cried foul over the elimination of its measure while the three others got to proceed. “Certain politicians have been intentionally trying to attack the ballot measure process for over a decade to prevent voters from being able to make decisions about Arizona’s future at the ballot box,” it said in a statement.

Hundreds of miles away, progressives in Arkansas face similar heartburn. Voters there raised the minimum wage and legalized cannabis for medical use in 2016 and 2018; this year, they will weigh on cannabis for recreational use.  But here, too, GOP lawmakers have placed a measure on the ballot, Issue 2, that would make it harder for voters to circumvent them in the future. 

“You have people who are supposed to be public servants who are trying to prevent people from expressing their will at the ballot box,” David McAvoy, a progressive advocate and founder of the Arkansas-based group Protect AR Voices, told Bolts. “This is an attempt to weaken people’s votes.”

McAvoy believes that, with Issue 2, Republican lawmakers are retaliating against the minimum wage and marijuana measures approved by Arkansans. That dynamic is also operative in Arizona, where residents have used the initiative process in recent cycles to adopt policies that their GOP-run state legislature wouldn’t. Since 2016, they too have raised the minimum wage and legalized cannabis; they also increased taxes on the wealthy to raise teachers’ salaries and required employers to provide paid sick time to their employees. This remarkable streak angered Arizona Republicans, who have set out to shut the door on future efforts this year.

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a national organization that supported the successful initiatives to increase the minimum wage in both Arizona in 2016 and Arkansas in 2018, is now fighting the latest ballot measures in each state. “If passed, these restrictions would further entrench minority rule in our political system and likely block popular policies from passing,” she told Bolts. “It’s absolutely essential that we protect the ballot measure tool so that people can continue to make progress when their elected officials will not.”

Ballot measures have come under assault nationwide, as Republican leaders have made parallel moves in many states to trip up voter-initiated referendums. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center has tracked the introduction of dozens of bills in recent years, many of which have become law. Some of the more onerous restrictions imposed new geographic distribution requirements for petition-gathering, which tends to reduce the power of cities, or they made petition gathering far more impractical.

Republican leaders have also responded to successful ballot measures initiated by residents by undermining them. In 2018, Utah voters approved statutes that expanded Medicaid, legalized cannabis for medical uses, and created a nonpartisan redistricting process. But in 2019, the state legislature repealed all of them, though it then re-enacted a narrower version of Medicaid expansion. Maine’s former Republican governor ignored a successful ballot initiative to expand Medicaid for years. And last year, Mississippi’s conservative supreme court struck down the entire initiative process.

Arizona’s state constitution contains strong protections that prevent some of this gamesmanship. Most significantly, it severely constrains the state legislature’s power to repeal or amend statutes initiated and approved by voters. Lawmakers are prohibited from modifying any voter-initiated statute unless their change “furthers the purpose” of the statute itself; this shield was included in the Voter Protection Act, a voter-initiated constitutional amendment that passed in 1998. In addition, and unlike many states, Arizona has no requirement that initiatives be limited to a “single subject,” which opens the door for ballot measures that propose sweeping changes.

But the three constitutional amendments that state Republicans are proposing would upend this system. The first, Proposition 128, would amend Arizona’s constitution to widen the circumstances under which lawmakers may repeal or amend a ballot measure—even after it has already gained the electorate’s support.

The proposition would enable the legislature to change a ballot measure when courts strike down any part over it. Proponents say lawmakers’ hands are currently tied when it comes to fixing an initiative when that happens. Opponents answer that the proposition would give politicians wide latitude to intervene as they could amend any section of a text if one part is struck down. Athena Salman, a Democratic state Representative, called it that the change is “a very sneaky way to undermine the Voter Protection Act without actually having to repeal the Voter Protection Act.”

The second, Proposition 129, would impose a “single subject” requirement for all voter-initiated measures; it would impose no such requirement on amendments proposed by the legislature. Many state courts have applied similar requirements harshly—the South Dakota supreme court last year struck down an initiative that legalized marijuana on this basis—which may provide Arizona’s high court, which the GOP has packed in recent years, with another tool to invalidate voter initiatives. The third, Proposition 132, would raise the approval threshold from 50 percent to a supermajority of 60 percent for voter-initiated measures that would raise taxes.

Arkansas’s Issue 2 would also impose a supermajority requirement, and it would go further than Arizona’s proposal by raising the threshold to 60 percent for all ballot measures. 

“It is entirely too easy to amend our state constitution,” said state Representative David Ray, the Republican lawmaker who drafted the measure. Ray, much like Republicans in Arizona, has complained that out-of-state money is championing organizing around referendums in the state. (Lawmakers voted largely on party lines when they placed Issue 2 on the ballot.) 

Arkansas Republicans already tried to limit their state’s ballot initiative process two years ago with a more sweeping constitutional amendment, known as Issue 3, that appeared on the ballot in November 2020. But Arkansas voters rejected that measure 56 to 44 percent. 

That same year, the state supreme court had struck down two measures over organizers’ alleged failure to conduct criminal background checks on petition gatherers; Arkansas statutes require organizers to certify that each canvasser has never been convicted of a broad array of offenses, including low-level charges like trespass (the high court said organizers took insufficient steps to ensure this). One of these measures would have created an independent redistricting commission. Instead, Republican lawmakers got to draw new maps in 2021 that solidified their party’s hold on power.

Earlier this year, South Dakotans rejected a similar effort to demand a supermajority. Republican lawmakers put an amendment on the June ballot that would have raised the threshold for some referendums to pass; the GOP rushed that measure to change the rules in time to thwart an effort to expand Medicaid. But the measure lost 67 to 33 percent in June, which has kept alive the possibility that South Dakotans expand Medicaid in November; the measure now only needs 50 percent of the vote—a goal that similar initiatives have crossed in many red states in recent years. (Arkansas and Arizona expanded Medicaid legislatively a decade ago.)

“Sometimes, when you take issues away from, ‘Is it Democrat or Republican,’ and just let the people speak, you find that people may come at it with very different views than the political party that they’re otherwise drawn to,” McAvoy told Bolts.

McAvoy said some Arkansas conservatives allied with progressives in 2020 to defeat the measure proposed that year to limit citizen-led ballot initiatives. “This cuts both ways in terms of the detrimental effect on democracy,” he said.

“While it’s definitely in this case the Republicans in power who are trying to stop things they don’t want,” he added, “I think across the board we all need to be concerned about what it means for our democracy and for our abilities to be heard on any issue, regardless of where we stand on the specifics.”

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