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.

Moon is now running to be the chief election official in Idaho, and one of her rivals in the Republican primary for secretary of state has a similarly loose grip on the facts. “I do not think that Joe Biden won the presidential election,” state Senator Mary Souza said during a recent televised debate, echoing the false conspiracies spread by former President Donald Trump. “I will call it death by a thousand cuts, as the Chinese would put it. It was ballot harvesting. It was ballot boxes that were … not manned. It was a lot of small changes in the law.”

Moon and Souza face off on Tuesday with a third candidate who, compared to the standards set by these two lawmakers, sounds like he’s running in a different race entirely. 

Phil McGrane currently serves as county clerk in Ada, home to Boise, and where a quarter of the state’s population lives. He started working in election administration in 2005, says that Biden won the presidency, and sought a grant to help run the 2020 election smoothly that many in his party now demonize. And in a state where the GOP controls all three branches of government and enjoys a super-majority in the legislature, McGrane is also an unabashedly conservative Republican with the support of all five of Idaho’s living governors. 

In a pre-2020 world, McGrane would be the clear front-runner, combining establishment support with the administrator persona that has often characterized secretaries of state. But can a Republican who spurns the Big Lie still win a GOP primary?

Nebraska provided a similar test just last week, when Secretary of State Bob Evnen survived against two Big Lie-touting candidates. Evnen, who has pushed back against conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was marked by irregularities, had the advantage of incumbency, and yet only received a weak 43 percent of the vote.

Election-denying candidates for secretary of state are running in many states this year, including in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, and Tuesday’s primary in Idaho may mark one of the Big Lie’s first statewide wins. While the responsibilities of these offices differ by state, they wield significant administrative and legal power, often administering voter registration as well as voting and certification processes.

As Trump demonstrated in 2020 when he called Georgia’s secretary of state and told him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, these officials will likely face enormous pressure going forward. Should the far-right take these offices, they could help sympathetic lawmakers investigate dubious claims of irregularities and question election results.

—

McGrane would likely not be progressives’ first choice for the state’s chief election official. He supports the state’s photo ID requirement and its law disenfranchising people with felony convictions until they’ve completed their full sentence, including probation and parole. (That’s uncommonly strict out west: Five of the six states that border Idaho, including Republican-leaning Utah and Montana, enable anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote.) 

When it comes to federal legislation, McGrane’s website says it’s “now more important than ever to protect Idaho’s elections from the influence of D.C.” He wrote a letter to both of Idaho’s U.S. senators urging them to “resist” HR1 and HR4, Democrats’ landmark voting bills that ultimately failed in the U.S. Senate. “I think the system is working well in terms of the states determining for themselves how to run,” he told Bolts.  

McGrane is pushing some reforms in Idaho, though. In February, he testified in favor of lowering the threshold for reporting campaign contributions, and he pushed for counties to be able to pre-process absentee ballots, a seemingly minor but important capability that Republican lawmakers have blocked in other states as part of their rhetoric against mail-in voting. The bill passed through unanimous votes in both chambers.  

But where McGrane has devoted most of his time is local election administration. He first joined the Ada County Clerk’s office in 2005 and was in charge of recruiting poll workers and counting punch cards, the infamous ballots that produced the “hanging chad” controversies in the 2000 presidential election. He eventually left the state for law school and then spent a year in D.C. clerking for the Election Assistance Commission, which supports state and local election officials. He returned to the office as the chief deputy clerk in 2010, launched an unsuccessful bid for secretary of state in 2014, and was elected as the Ada County Clerk in 2018. 

One of McGrane’s signature accomplishments is what he calls “food truck voting,” the mobile voting centers that crisscross the county during the ten days of early voting. They were inspired by McGrane’s love of barbecue. “He participates in competitions with his father-in-law, and he’s quite good at it,” says David Levine, who worked for McGrane between 2017 and 2019. McGrane first deployed his voter trucks in 2016, four years before Los Angeles rolled out its mobile voting precincts. 

The trucks, which serve as emergency poll sites if there’s a natural disaster or power outage, also helped the county strengthen its election security. “We actually hired white hat hackers to come test our systems out,” McGrane says. “So, we were slightly ahead of the cybersecurity curve. If you remember, that was right after the DNC hack.” 

Levine, who now works as the Elections Integrity Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan national security group based in Washington, D.C., says his former boss stands out among local election administrators. “Phil is someone who’s really at the leading edge,” he told Bolts. “He wouldn’t tell you that because it’s not his personality. He’ll joke around and say, ‘We’re little Idaho over here,’ but you shouldn’t let that fool you.” 

Under McGrane, Ada County also acquired on-demand ballot printers so that residents can vote early anywhere in the county. “If they work in downtown Boise but live out in a rural community, they shouldn’t have to drive home just to vote,” McGrane says. 

Leveraging technology is a fundamental part of McGrane’s campaign, which seems obvious for a candidate in 2022 but comes at a time when many Republicans are spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines and advocating for ballots to be counted by hand. “There’s a push by some—and I’ve seen this in my race—to say we need to get rid of all technology,” he says. 

Moon and Souza did not respond to requests for Bolts’s comments.

McGrane has also clashed with his opponents on other popular misinformation, though with some qualifications.

He told Bolts that Biden won the last presidential election, something his two primary opponents have falsely denied, taking issue with McGrane’s answer during a recent debate. But when asked if Biden was the legitimate winner, he only replied, “Joe Biden is clearly in the White House.” 

“I’ve talked to a lot of people around the state who have concerns and doubts,” he said, “and one of the challenges for anyone in the space is to try to bolster the confidence in our elections.”

When it comes to maintaining accurate voter rolls, McGrane says he would be in favor of Idaho joining “something like” ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center that allows its 30 member states and D.C. to share information about voter deaths, name changes, and changes of address. He said he “needs more information” about joining ERIC itself. Idaho is not currently a member of the organization, which has recently become a lightning rod for far-right conspiracy theorists. 

And then there are the 2020 election grants that the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed to election administrators around the country. For many on the right, these grants are evidence of a flagrant left-wing plot to buy the election because they were funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

McGrane applied for a grant and received nearly $500,000. (19 other Idaho counties received grants well.) That decision grew controversial in Republican circles. Souza, the state senator now running against him, proposed banning outside money from funding election administration; she says election officials should not be spending resources to promote voting or encourage turnout, a stance. Her bill was signed into law last year.

But McGrane stands by his choice. “One of the things I’m proud about is, in 2020 Ada County maintained all of its normal polling locations,” he says. There was a surge in voting costs that year, he says, and “no money from the state legislature.” 

Moon supported Souza’s bill last year, and she also championed legislation to prohibit student identification cards as an accepted form of voter ID and to require people who register at the polls on Election Day to prove citizenship their vote. (Her bill passed the House but did not receive a hearing in the Senate.) Moon also has ties to far-right extremists, including Ammon Bundy, who led the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon.

And yet, even as Moon and Souza have parrotted Trump’s talking points about election fraud and pushed new restrictions, neither has received an endorsement from the former president, who has only endorsed Idaho candidates for the governorship and U.S. Senate. 

These days, it can seem like Trump’s endorsement is the only one that matters in Republican primaries. Still, McGrane enjoys near-unanimous support from the state’s executive branch. He has also raised more money, from more donors, than the other two candidates combined. Whoever wins the Republican primary will be favored against Democrat Shawn Keenan in November given the state’s deeply red hue.

Tuesday’s results may offer a stark reminder of the firm grip that the Big Lie has on the GOP. McGrane seems to be aware of the larger stakes at play and what this victory might mean for the conflicts over election administration more broadly. “I think the fissures in our party here are probably some of the most pronounced in the country,” he says.

The post Conspiracies Swirl in Idaho Primary for Chief Election Official appeared first on Bolts.

The Idaho ballot initiative to expand Medicaid got a lift in September when the Idaho Sheriffs Association endorsed it, citing in part the effect it could have in relieving the criminal justice system. “Their endorsement was a big boost to our campaign,” Luke Mayville, a founder of Reclaim Idaho, the group that put this initiative on the ballot, told me. “They’ve seen the extent to which drug addiction problems are interwoven with criminal justice and incarceration, and they believe that the kind of drug treatment and addiction treatment that Medicaid would provide would be an aid to their effort to reduce crime.”

Calls for criminal justice reform and efforts to expand Medicaid boosted one another nationwide during the 2018 campaign.

Stacey Abrams, Georgia Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, explicitly connected these dots in a detailed criminal justice reform platform that featured the expansion as a core plank. “When individuals receive Medicaid and can finally access mental health and substance abuse treatment in their communities, crime rates drop,” the document states, describing the expansion as “a vital investment in public health and public safety.”

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) significantly expanded Medicaid eligibility for low-income people. But some states have refused to expand the program, depriving millions of the public insurance that the ACA was meant to provide. This harms people released from incarceration. “They most likely will be uninsured because they won’t come out and have a job with employer benefits, and they’re unlikely to be able to afford private insurance,” Robin Rudowitz, an associate director for the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “Without coverage, those individuals do not have access to affordable, comprehensive medical care.” It also leaves many individuals who experience mental health or addiction issues unable to afford treatment, making them more vulnerable to punitive policies.

Stacey Abrams fell short in Georgia. But voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah all voted to expand Medicaid via referendums.

Molly McCleery, the deputy director of the health care program of Nebraska Appleseed and an adviser for Nebraska’s expansion campaign, and Mayville both said that criminal justice reform messaging did not feature prominently in their states’ campaigns. But they both also believe that it proved potent with conservative voters worried about the opioid crisis and “the severity of drug addiction,” as Mayville put it.

Mayville recalls encountering criticism that expansion meant providing public benefits to people who are addicted to drugs. “I made the case that far from it being a problem that people on drugs would be on Medicaid, that’s one of the main positives, a tool to fight drug addiction,” Mayville said. “Once I framed it in terms of, we’re trying to give people a way out of addiction, rather than just simply giving benefits to people who are wallowing in addiction, once I framed it as these benefits giving people a way out of addiction and the incarceration that comes with it, I found that to be a good argument.”

Similarly, McCleery told me that the opioid crisis came up during community presentations in Nebraska, and that expansion proponents emphasized the care that Medicaid coverage enables.  “One thing people really understand is that if you don’t have insurance you are relying on safety net services, a patchwork of services, and you may not get the full scope of treatment you would get if you had insurance,” McCleery said. She noted that this resonated in rural areas, which have been hit by hospital closures nationwide and in Nebraska.

The successful referendums are just the beginning for Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. Beyond the questions about how officials will implement them, eligible individuals who interact with the criminal justice system still encounter obstacles to coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation has released multiple reports on how to facilitate actual access to care, for instance by helping people sign up before they are released or suspending rather than terminating their coverage while they are incarcerated. “The Medicaid expansion created more incentives for states to link [the justice-involved] population to coverage and care,” Rudowitz said.

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