The passage of Prop 36 will also lengthen the sentences of some existing felonies up to three years if the crime, like felony theft causing property damage, was committed together by three or more people. It will also require that felony convictions for selling drugs be served in state prisons, whereas currently some of those sentences are served in county jails. The measure will also create a new category of offense, a “treatment-mandated felony,” which carries a prison sentence of up to three years for people with previous drug convictions who fail to complete court-ordered treatment.

Prop 36 reverses some of the changes California voters made a decade ago when they passed Prop 47, which made some felonies misdemeanors in order to reduce severe overcrowding in the state’s prisons. The state estimates that the reduced incarceration from Prop 47 helped save $800 million over the past decade, the majority of which was reallocated to mental health and drug treatment services.

Advocates who supported those reforms a decade ago are now bracing for a reversal of those trends, as the state’s own analysis predicts that costs associated with increased punishment and prison will soar as state funds allocated to treatment services fall with the passage of Prop 36. While this year’s ballot measure was put forth as a way to make communities safer, opponents worry it will bring a drop in services that erodes community safety. 

“Rather than strip money away from resources, we should have doubled down and really fund these things that actually worked,” said Jose Bernal, Political Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “The safest communities are the ones that are the most resourced, and so that’s the alternative. That’s what we’ve been fighting for.”

Advocates for incarcerated people fear that Prop 36 will also exacerbate the overcrowding and dangerous conditions that still exist inside many local jails and state prisons. Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, one of the groups that opposed Prop 36, said jails are already severely overcrowded and understaffed, and sending more people to jail will prevent them from getting treatment and prevention.

“We’re going to fill them up with more people, that means people are going to die in there, it means people are going to take a longer time to be able to go to trial, that means more people in the county jail will be suffering instead of actually receiving the treatment that they need.” 

Prison overcrowding, and the dangerous and squalid conditions that it created behind bars, helped motivate California to take a step away from mass incarceration with the 2014 passage of Prop 47. 

At the time, California prisons held about 156,000 men and women in custody, almost twice their holding capacity. The prison system averaged around one death each week as overcrowding created dangerous conditions inside. Civil rights lawsuits over inadequate medical and mental health care eventually led to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had violated people’s Eighth Amendment rights. The 5-4 ruling, which found that overcrowding was the primary cause for lapses in treatment, upheld a lower court’s order for the prison system to decrease its population by 46,000. 

“Prop 47 was passed because we decided that we want to change felony [charges] so people would not be incarcerated, cost us millions of dollars and human lives,” Lewis said.

From the time the measure passed in 2014 to now, the incarcerated population has fallen from about 131,200 to over 91,800. But after a decade of falling prison populations, Prop 36 is now set to rapidly grow the number of people behind bars in the state. According to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, elevating penalties for theft and drug crimes could increase California’s prison population by 35 percent over the next five years, which would fully undo the reductions the state has seen over the past decade.

A state legislative analysis estimated that implementing Prop 36 would increase state spending on criminal punishment “ranging from several tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The analysis also estimated that local criminal justice authorities like jails and police departments could see costs increase “by tens of millions of dollars annually.”

The Prop 47 reforms a decade ago funneled savings from decarceration toward community-based support services like mental health and addiction treatment, school truancy and dropout prevention, and job training and housing assistance. Since 2014, the state has allocated around half a billion dollars in savings from Prop 47 to local programs that have helped reduce recidivism for low-level offenses across California. 

As those savings dry up thanks to the passage of Prop 36, so will state funding for those local programs, according to the legislative analysis, which estimated a reduction of state spending “in the low tens of millions of dollars annually.”

Bernal with the Ella Baker Center said he would often hear people who supported Prop 36 say that they thought the measure supported programs for people who needed treatment or housing. He said that grassroots organizers who opposed the measure struggled to convince voters concerned about public safety that it could actually threaten community programs that help prevent crime. “I think the people who voted in favor of Prop 36 really want to live in safe communities and don’t want everyone locked up, particularly Black and brown folks,” Bernal added. “But I think folks were misguided.”

Prop 36 was introduced as an effort to assuage voters’ fears about surging rates of shoplifting and commercial theft, which did increase during the pandemic. This time also saw dramatic videos of so-called smash-and-grab burglaries that spread widely across social media and national news. 

But a longer-term view reveals an opposite trend: Property crime rates are at some of the lowest levels they’ve been in 40 years. More recent analysis by the California Budget and Policy Center shows that rates of shoplifting remain below pre-pandemic levels. 

At the same time, a study of the Prop 47 reforms published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that its passage had no impact on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and burgalary; while motor theft and larceny rates went up, California’s rates still remained below the national average. Bradley Bartos, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Arizona who co-authored the study, said he doesn’t think that “the nitty gritty technical details of the proposition are going to address the change to the landscape of property crime.”

The authors of Prop 36 have also stated that it is aimed to reduce homelessness, but studies show that formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to become homeless than the general population. Accordingly, California’s leading homeless policy organizations have come out against the measure. 

Already, observers are characterizing the passage of Prop 36 as part of a larger “pendulum swing” towards harsher punishment in California politics. At the same time voters approved Prop 36, they rejected another measure—Prop 6, which would have prohibited slavery and banned forced labor in California. Los Angeles also ousted progressive District Attorney George Gascon in favor of his more conservative opponent, and in Oakland, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Pamela Price after just two years. More California counties voted red than in 2020. Bartos said “it certainly is movement in the opposite direction California had been moving” over the last decade.

But advocates point out that this swing has much more to do with public perceptions of crime than facts on the ground. Lewis attributes the measure’s success to scare tactics pushed by politicians and harmful narratives from news media that led people to believe that crime was going up, despite FBI data showing otherwise.

“The narrative has been one to scare people, to believe that if we lock people up for addiction, that’s going to help us,” Lewis said. “We did that before, and we found that it didn’t work.” 

Bartos at the University of Arizona concurs: “People’s perception of how at risk they are has changed over the last four years,” he said, in large part due to shoplifting videos that have gone viral on social media.

The Prop 36 “yes” campaign was backed by large retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, which collectively gave more than $4 million to the campaign, as well as statewide prosecutor and prison guard organizations. Bartos fears Prop 36 will give law enforcement officials the discretion to arrest and prosecute low level offenders.

“If police and prosecutors interpret this as a broad countering crime mandate, you may start to see them act as such and be more willing to arrest, pursue,” Bartos said. “It’s going to be a question, how people view it more so than how it changes the calculus of crime.”

Ricardo Garcia, the Los Angeles County Public Defender who opposed Prop 36, said California has “gone back in time 10 years” and predicted a decline in services that will likely lead to worsening drug addiction, substance abuse and trauma.

“After this election, we may find ourselves in the most challenging landscape for the criminal legal system and reform that we’ve seen in decades,” Garcia said. “But it doesn’t mean that we stop the struggle or that the struggle is over. Elected officials need to own the solutions that bring us real safety, accountability and justice, and they need to be proud of them.” 

Lewis points out that poverty is a main driver of criminal behavior, and that addressing people’s material needs is a more lasting solution, rather than mass incarceration. He points to instances he has heard of people being arrested for selling baby formula, for example.

“When we think about people that are committing these petty crimes, do you think they’re trying to take over the world and make a million dollars from that? No, they’re trying to feed their children, but those are also the type of people that will be locking up,” Lewis said.

Numerous advocates have said that they will continue to push local and state elected officials to find ways to fund resources that are going to lose money following the passage of Prop 36. The goal, they said, is to redirect resources into proactive measures like substance treatment, schools, creating jobs, and affordable housing for individuals and families. 

“We’re not going to stop, we’re going to keep fighting,” Lewis said. We’re going to do the things that the government that’s supposed to represent us, that’s supposed to really fight for us. If they won’t do it, we’ll do it.”

The post How California’s Embrace of a Tough-on-Crime Measure May Undo a Decade of Reform appeared first on Bolts.

They voted down Prop 137, which would have largely ended judicial elections in the state and frozen in place the state supreme court’s current conservative majority. They also rejected Prop 134 and 136, which would have severely limited direct democracy by making it far tougher to qualify a measure for the ballot. 

All three measures lost handily, with Prop 137 going down by the largest margin. With some ballots remaining to be counted, it trails 77 to 23 percent as of publication. 

Arizonans on the same day approved an initiative to protect abortion in the state, overturning a 15-week ban GOP lawmakers adopted in 2022. This measure was placed on the ballot through a citizen-led effort, precisely the sort of organizing that would have become prohibitively difficult in the future if Prop 134 and 136 had passed.

“It is heartening that these measures went down pretty solidly,” said Jim Barton, an Arizona attorney who has defended ballot measure campaigns in court and opposed Prop 134 and 136. “Despite all of the work that legislators have done to try to take away citizens’ rights to make laws, we have still been able to get good things done.”

Andy Gordon, another Arizona expert in election law who worked with the group Keep Courts Accountable to convince voters to reject Prop 137, shared Barton’s relief at the results. 

Voters, he said, “recognize there are a group of initiatives that would have taken their rights without giving anything in return, and they voted ‘no’ on those. And on the one that gave them something—in this case reproductive rights—they voted ‘yes.'” 

The Republican attempts to overhaul the state’s constitution came as Democrats have gained ground in Arizona but have failed so far to take over the legislature, prompting the GOP to try to close down some of the alternative avenues the left has used to make gains.

The proposed overhaul of the judiciary would have ended the requirement that judges on the state’s appeals courts and supreme court, and some local courts, win the approval of voters at regular intervals after being appointed by the governor. 

The measure would have given judges a permanent appointment up to age 70, taking voters out of the picture unless a judge fails a performance evaluation or faces specific circumstances like being convicted of certain crimes. 

Had it passed, Prop 137 would also have applied to this year’s elections, nullifying the results of the judicial races that were on the ballot on Tuesday.

Republican lawmakers advanced the proposal this summer to voters after progressives launched a campaign to oust Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, two conservative judges on the state supreme court who had just voted to revive a near-total ban on abortion. Bolick’s wife, Shawnna Bolick, is a state Senator who voted in favor of putting Prop 137 on the ballot.

Bolick and King handily won their retention races on Tuesday, a blow to progressives hoping to reshape the court. As of publication, they have 58 and 59 percent of the vote, respectively. 

Judicial retention races are typically sleepy contests that see little controversy or campaigning. No state supreme court justice has ever lost a retention election in Arizona, and the last time Bolick ran for retention in 2018, he prevailed with 70 percent of the vote. 

But 2022 saw an unusual liberal campaign to oust conservative Justice Bill Montgomery, who survived by 10 percentage points, a slim margin for an Arizona justice. The left’s attempt to unseat Montgomery grew from fears of a right-wing domination of the courts after Republicans added seats to the supreme court under former Governor Doug Ducey. Then, conservatives bristled at the losses of several local judges in Maricopa County in 2022, claiming that these elections were overly politicizing the judiciary. Bolick wrote in an opinion piece in May that progressives are “weaponizing judicial retention.”

Timothy Berg, a constitutional law attorney who co-chairs Arizonans for an Independent Judiciary, a political action committee that advocated for voters to keep Bolick and King, told Bolts that Prop 137 would have changed the Arizona judicial system “to give voters less control.”

“Voting it down is consistent with Arizona’s longtime approach to politics: that voters want a say in who their judges are,” Berg said.

All justices on the state supreme court have been appointed by Republican governors, though that is about to change since Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is set to pick a replacement for Justice Robert Brutinel, who announced his retirement in September. 

Hobbs was not on the ballot on Tuesday and will remain governor until at least 2026. Democrats were hoping to gain control of the legislature this year and fully run the state government for the first time since the 1960s. The final results are not yet known, but as of publication Democrats are just short of what they would need to accomplish that goal.

Absent legislative majorities for Democrats, progressives over the years have resorted to the citizen-led initiative process to ask Arizonans to approve reforms. This included establishing publicly funded elections in 1998, raising the minimum wage in 2016, legalizing recreational marijuana in 2020, and requiring campaigns to disclose the identity of major donors in 2022. And, this year, it included Prop 139, the abortion rights measure. 

“Initiatives are largely a safety valve for legislative inactivity,” said Gordon. “There was no way in hell this legislature or any legislature in recent history was going to advance the right to abortion and other reproductive rights.”

Prop 134 and 136 would have restricted this path going forward by severely tightening the already arduous process to get an initiative on the ballot. 

Prop 134 would have required citizen initiatives to meet a certain threshold of signatures from every single legislative district in Arizona. Currently, campaigns can qualify for the ballot by collecting a set number of signatures regardless of where in the state they come from. Critics said this requirement would have made the process prohibitively difficult for advocacy organizations and volunteer groups by requiring them to run costly campaigns in sparsely populated areas, and allow measures to be killed by any of the state’s 30 districts.

“This is an effort to make it harder for regular people to engage in the process,” Dawn Penich, an advocate for the campaign that qualified the abortion rights measure this year, told Bolts in May. She described how difficult it already is for organizers to put issues on the ballot. “It is grueling work,” she said. “I’m out in the field, on the streets, at trailheads with our volunteers many days a week.” 

Prop136, meanwhile, would have allowed opponents to challenge the constitutionality of citizen initiatives as soon as it qualifies for the ballot, before they pass. Opponents said it would have made it easier to kill citizen-driven reforms with costly legal battles before voters even had a chance to weigh in, exploding the amount of money needed to run a competitive ballot campaign. 

“Moving these disputes to the court and away from the voting process, it is about taking the power away from voters,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel for the Voting Rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Direct democracy is critical for correcting some distortions in our representative democracy. It serves as a really necessary check on other institutions.” 

Barton said that many voters perceived Prop 134 and 136 as attempts to sabotage the democratic process. Tuesday’s results, he said, “means that voters paid attention more than Republicans thought they would—the citizens do not want tricks to be involved.” 

This isn’t the first time Arizonans have voted to protect direct democracy. In 1998, they amended the state constitution to stop lawmakers from weakening, tweaking or repealing citizen-driven ballot measures after they had been approved by voters. 

“Voters got tired of legislators trying to amend or change the measures they had passed,” Barton recalls. “This is another example of that, where citizens have said—we are not going to allow you to step on our rights.”

Citizen-led initiatives are used by conservatives and progressives alike. In states that are run by Democrats, the right often pursues these measures. Voters in Washington state, for instance, weighed in this fall on initiatives that would have overturned environmental regulations and repealed a capital gains tax on wealthy residents; both failed on Tuesday. Voters in California and Colorado approved initiatives to restrict some forms of punishment.

Still, Republican politicians have moved aggressively in recent years to undercut initiatives. In Montana this year, Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen barred petitions from counting signatures of registered voters who are “inactive”—those who have changed addresses or have missed two consecutive elections—though a judge blocked the rule change. And the GOP has proposed constitutional amendments in many other states to weaken the initiative process.

In 2022 and 2023, voters in Arkansas, Ohio, and South Dakota all rejected such, and in North Dakota they did it just this week: They defeated a GOP-backed measure that would have raised the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative, and also required initiatives to be adopted twice, on two different dates—on the primary ballot and then the general election ballot. 

“Voters are closely guarding their direct democracy powers,” Clapman said. “Consistently, when it is clear to voters that a ballot measure would strengthen or weaken direct democracy, they choose to strengthen. Voters like having this power.”

Barton agrees, saying of Arizonans, “the voters worked very hard to protect their rights.”

The post Arizonans Defeat Three GOP Measures That Would Have Restricted Their Voting Power appeared first on Bolts.

The result is a blow to the democracy organizations that have been combating gerrymandering in the state. They mobilized on behalf of Issue 1 after the lengthy legal standoff with Ohio Republicans in 2022, when the GOP, in a repeat of the prior decade, drew maps that locked in comfortable majorities for their candidates.

It’s also a repeat of two prior defeats for similar ballot measures that would have created independent commissions in both 2005 and 2012. 

“It’s incredibly sad, and it’s not clear to me what the next steps are to improve our democracy,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause, an organization that was part of the coalition that collected hundreds of thousands of signatures that qualify Issue 1 for the ballot. “Addressing gerrymandering is so much about holding elected officials accountable and creating fair districts and fair elections so that we can actually have a functional government.” 

As of publication, the measure is trailing by roughly eight percentage points, with some ballots remaining to be counted.

While several polls in October showed Issue 1 with very large leads, those surveys were simply asking voters if they wanted to create an independent redistricting commission. The official language Ohioans saw on their ballot was very different: GOP officials wrote an official summary that characterized the measure as requiring gerrymandering rather than restricting it. A rare poll that tested the official language found the race effectively tied.

Voters came forward during the early voting period in October to warn that they felt tricked by the GOP-crafted summary. Songgu Kwon, a comic book writer living near Athens, told Bolts that he meant to support the independent redistricting commission but mistakenly voted against Issue 1 after feeling confused in the voting booth. “I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” he said. 

Other media outlets reported similar complaints from other voters who said they only realized after voting ‘no’ that they had meant to vote ‘yes.’ Turcer attributes Issue 1’s failure to the “incredibly deceptive ballot language,” telling Bolts, “elected officials were willing to do anything to stop Issue 1.” 

Opponents of Issue 1 defended the ballot language, with Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who drafted much of it, calling it an “honest explanation.” A spokesperson for Ohio Works, the committee that promoted the ‘no’ vote, said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

Issue 1 prevailed in Ohio’s urban centers, which are also the regions whose power the GOP’s gerrymanders have undercut, but it trailed in the more exurban and rural areas. 

Ohioans on the same day voted for Donald Trump for president, and the county-level results for Issue 1 broadly correlate with the presidential results, with more Republican areas opposing the proposed reform.

Aware that they had to persuade Ohioans who vote Republican in this red-leaning state, the ‘yes’ campaign made the case that stopping gerrymandering should not be a partisan issue.

“When you have a gerrymandered state, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats doing the gerrymandering, what you end up with is legislators who are not responsive to the citizens, and you end up with bad public policy, and it just holds your state back,” Chris Davey, a spokesperson for Citizens Not Politicians, the campaign for Issue 1, told Bolts.

One of the measure’s chief proponents was Maureen O’Connor, Ohio’s former Republican chief justice. O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues on the state supreme court two years ago to strike down Republican-drawn maps seven separate times, but the GOP leaders ran out the clock until O’Connor retired in December of 2022 and her Republican replacement blessed gerrymanders. O’Connor also featured in advertising for Issue 1 this fall, telling voters that the measure “will restore power to where it belongs—with citizens, not politicians.”

But the state’s Republican leaders, including Governor Mike DeWine, rallied against Issue 1. The ‘no’ campaign appealed to Ohio’s overall red lean, making the case that the measure boiled down to an attempt by the Democratic Party to expand its influence on the state. “Don’t let Democrats rewrite the rules,” one ad for the ‘no’ campaign stated. “Protect Ohio’s voice!”

The ‘no’ campaign also emulated the ballot language in trying to turn the table on Issue 1, with yard signs and other messaging that proclaimed that a ‘no’ vote would “stop gerrymandering.” Opponents of Issue 1 made the case that it would erase constitutional protections against unfair maps that Ohioans approved in a 2015 referendum, but reform advocates complained that the Republican mapmakers basically ignored those criteria when they last redrew districts in 2022.

Issue 1 would have set up a new, 15-member panel made up of citizens selected from a pool of applicants; the body, tasked with redrawing the state’s maps, would have included five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. 

This system would have broadly resembled similar commissions set up in states like Arizona, California, and Michigan, which adopted new redistricting processes through successful ballot initiatives. Most recently, in 2018, Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment that set up an independent redistricting commission by an overwhelming majority, with 61 percent of the vote.

Instead, the failure of Ohio’s measure protects the status quo, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor and secretary of state, plus appointees of legislative leaders. 

Going into Tuesday, Ohio’s congressional delegation has 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats. The state House is made up of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats. And the state Senate is made up of 26 Republicans and 7 Democrats. 

These splits mask a deeper asymmetry in the current congressional map: All 10 of the GOP-held congressional districts are considered to be safely Republican, meaning that they pack so many voters who reliably vote for the GOP that Democrats are not expected to be able to compete there. By contrast, three of the five Democratic-held districts are competitive and winnable by the GOP. In fact, Democrats may lose one of the seats they hold on Tuesday, as the 9th District remains too close as of publication.

Issue 1 included a requirement that the state’s congressional and legislative maps closely mirror Ohio’s statewide partisan split. It likely would have resulted in maps that included at least one additional Democratic-leaning congressional seat, and at least a dozen additional Democratic-leaning legislative seats. This would not have guaranteed how each district votes on any election day, but it would have likely changed the composition of the legislature and House delegation. 

Turcer, of Common Cause, said she is not sure yet what comes next for her and other anti-gerrymandering advocates. “We need to regroup and figure out how we’re actually going to get the job done,” she said. “What I do know is that it is going to take time and effort, and we’re gonna have to be really thoughtful and strategic, and that means it’ll take time to figure out what our next steps are.”

But she also stressed she is determined to find a way to constrain gerrymandering to ensure that voters’ partisan preferences are better reflected in Congress and the legislature. “Their goal is to maximize their power, not to actually create fair elections,” she said of the state’s elected officials.

She added, “We all want to participate in meaningful elections. We don’t want to participate in theater.”

The post Ohioans Reject Redistricting Reform, Protecting GOP Gerrymanders appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

He added, “I thought this was a serious document, and that there would be some standard.” Other Ohioans have come forward with similar stories in recent days, complaining they meant to vote ‘yes’ but got tricked by the ballot language into not doing so.

Now the fate of Ohio’s redistricting reform hinges on whether its proponents can dispel this confusion and get the word out to all the residents who intend to support it. 

The result will determine who gets to draw future state congressional and legislative districts, and it may shift seats as early as 2026. But more than that, the dispute adds to a larger saga over the viability of direct democracy in Ohio. Just last summer, the GOP pushed an amendment that would have made it much less likely for future citizen-initiated measures to succeed. That proposal failed, but Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told me at the time that she expected Republican leaders to “come back and try again” this year. Now she says that’s exactly what they did when they skewed this latest measure’s ballot language. 

Lewis helped organize Issue 1 this year. And just like in the summer of 2023, she said, state officials “are threatened by the idea that the people of Ohio would have power.”

“They have understood that Ohioans don’t want gerrymandering, they have nothing good to say about voting ‘no’,” she said, “so the only thing they can say is, if you vote ‘yes,’ on this, you’re requiring gerrymandering, which is the exact opposite of the truth.”

Issue 1 would amend the state constitution to create a new panel to draw Ohio districts. It would be made up of 15 citizens selected by retired judges from a pool of applicants; the body would need to include five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. Elected officials would be barred from serving on the commission. 

An independent commission would mark a huge change from current law, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor, the secretary of state, and appointees of legislative leaders. The constitution already requires that new maps respect certain principles of fairness. But when Ohio’s high court in 2022 struck down GOP gerrymanders seven separate times, ordering the process to be more equitable, GOP leaders ignored the rulings and ran out the clock until they landed a more conservative court in the 2022 midterms. Issue 1 would also codify more stringent fairness criteria for the new commission to respect. 

The coalition that drafted Issue 1 collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. But as the secretary of state, LaRose got the opportunity to write the measure’s official summary. LaRose had been an active player in the redistricting process that drew the current maps that favor the GOP, but wrote his proposed summary in a way that suggested Issue 1 would make it likelier that Ohio gets gerrymandered. Proponents of Issue 1 immediately complained that his text was misleading. 

They got more angry after LaRose’s draft went up for review in front of the Ohio Ballot Board, a five-person body that includes LaRose and has a GOP majority. During that process, Republican state Senator and board member Theresa Gavarone proposed the specific wording that Kwon says tripped him up most: She suggested using the term “gerrymander” to describe the way Issue 1 would require a commission to divide up the state.

Gavarone’s proposed tweak was met by gasps and startled laughter from the audience. (This can be heard in the recording’s 1:35:20 mark.) State Representative Terrence Upchurch, one of two Democrats on the board, then laughed in bewilderment when given the opportunity to respond to Gavarone. Still, a majority of the board approved LaRose’s draft and Gavarone’s amendment.

Voting rights groups rushed to court, asking for the language to be struck down. But the state supreme court, which has a narrow GOP majority, rebuffed them in September and upheld most of the ballot summary. 

The four Republican justices said it was accurate to say that the new independent commission would “gerrymander” Ohio since it would be tasked with taking partisanship into account, even if it’s to draw a more evenly divided map.

The three Democratic justices disagreed furiously. Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in a dissent, “We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

According to Derek Clinger, an Ohio-based lawyer who has litigated past ballot language cases in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, many states use a system like Ohio’s: They ask elected partisan officials to draft ballot summaries. Still, some do it differently. Oregon, for instance, randomly selects citizens to meet and write statements summarizing each ballot measure. 

But what frustrates Clinger is that Ohio’s state constitution does contain “workable standards” that are meant to enable oversight onto the decisions made by state officials; it states that language on the ballot can’t “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Clinger said, “You have this standard, but you had a majority [on the state supreme court] that disregarded that.”

Some Ohio justices take the view that they’re not supposed to play a strong oversight role. Pat DeWine, a Republican justice who is also the son of Ohio’s governor, even has a forthcoming law review essay on the matter. DeWine admits that the Ohio Ballot Board “is composed of partisan actors who may have incentives to draft language that at least subtly favors one side or the other.” But the court should be wary of second guessing them, he writes: It “polices only the outer boundaries of the board’s discretion.” 

Clinger, who now works at the State Democracy Research Initiative, a research hub at the University of Wisconsin Law School, disagrees. He points to a separate dispute that unfolded in Utah this fall: There, Republicans advanced a referendum meant to allow lawmakers to more easily overturn citizen-initiated measures, while also crafting ballot language claiming that their proposal would “strengthen the initiative process.” 

The Utah supreme court voided this measure in September, writing that a referendum must be placed “on the ballot in such words and in such form that the voters are not confused thereby.”

“Despite the partisan implications of the case, the Utah Supreme Court seemed able to assess in good faith whether the ballot language fairly described the proposal,” Clinger said. “The big takeaway for me is that the personnel of the court is so important.”

The composition of Ohio’s supreme court is on the line this fall since the state is holding elections for three of its seven seats. The GOP could expand its majority from 4-3 to 6-1, but Democrats also have an opportunity to flip the court in their favor. 

Neither Gavarone nor LaRose responded to Bolts’ requests for comment for this story. LaRose said in a statement last month that the court’s decision was “a huge win for Ohio voters, who deserve an honest explanation of what they’re being asked to decide.” 

If Issue 1 passes, the state would have to quickly set up a new commission to create new maps by the 2026 midterms. But for now, proponents of the reform are focused on getting the measure across the finish line. 

 A poll conducted this month by YouGov found that support for Issue 1 had a large lead of over 20 percentage points. But the survey did not use the actual language that people are seeing on their ballot; instead, it asked how respondents would vote after telling them that “a ‘yes’ vote would establish a new bipartisan redistricting commission” and “ban partisan gerrymandering.” That’s precisely the explanation that proponents are fretting won’t be on the measure.

“I’m not going to rest easy at all until election results have come in,” Lewis said. She says she is worried about “a lot of confusion and purposeful misinformation” during the campaign, like the incorrect claims by GOP opponents of the measure that law enforcement officers and veterans would not be eligible to be on the redistricting commission, for instance. 

Citizens Not Politicians, the committee running the “yes” campaign, is working to reach voters and explain what the measure actually does. The group launched an ad this fall in which former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor tells voters that politicians opposed to Issue 1 have “lied” to them. O’Connor, a Republican, voted to strike down GOP gerrymanders in 2022; since leaving office two years ago, she has helped champion Issue 1. 

The committee behind the “no” campaign, Ohio Works, is running ads as well. They have used the same strategy as the Ohio Ballot Board, of trying to associate Issue 1 with gerrymandering. In response to the criticism that some voters feel tricked by this characterization, a spokesperson for Ohio Works has said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

But Kwon, the comic book writer, gives this warning to other Ohio voters: “Be careful. When you read the description, they’re going to refer to any attempt to change the current districting as gerrymandering. That’s what really threw me.”

“I would just say that, if you’re voting ‘yes,’ you’re voting to reform the current districting system,” he added.

Kwon feels frustrated that he unintentionally undercut a reform he supports and canceled out his wife’s vote. But together they’ve been burning up their friend network ever since to share word of his misfortune. 

He said, “If me sharing the story prevents somebody from getting tricked like I was, or one or two people from getting tricked, hopefully that will balance it out.”

The post Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

In November, Arizona voters will decide on Proposition 312, a ballot measure that would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred to address people illegally camping, using drugs, or defecating in public.

The measure was put forth by critics of the homelessness policies of many Arizona cities, and can be understood by looking at two legal standoffs over unhoused camping in public spaces. One was a massive encampment in Phoenix called “The Zone,” which, at its peak, was home to over 1,000 unhoused people. The other: a mostly dry riverbed in Tucson called Navajo Wash. 

Over the past few years, dozens of unhoused people have taken up camp in a city-owned section of Navajo Wash, which was once dotted with palo verde and mesquite trees that provided some relief from the scorching desert sun. But some neighbors cut many of them down, without the city’s approval, leaving behind over 50 twisted stumps scattered across the patch of land. Those same neighbors later sued the city, demanding the camps be forcibly dismantled. The neighbors claimed they were “negatively impacted by the masses of garbage and human waste.” 

Tucson does not have a policy of clearing every homeless encampment following complaints. Instead, camps that don’t pose public safety risks are allowed to stay. The city helps remove trash, offers services and monitors the encampment. Law enforcement is only called to encampments when there are reports of violent or criminal activity, which are then swept away.

In court, Tucson’s lawyers insisted the city’s handling of Navajo Wash was adequate. City workers had handed out basic supplies like backpacks, tarps, food and water. They cleaned up trash at the site and referred people to services steering them toward a shelter or permanent living situation. The court agreed, ruling that the city adequately abated the “nuisance” without forcibly clearing people away. 

Tucson’s strategy of dealing with homelessness by getting people into permanent housing while offering voluntary services follows a widely-used model called Housing First. This model avoids requiring people to complete programs or meet other preconditions to get housing resources. Its advocates cite research showing this approach increases the likelihood of people remaining in stable housing, accessing medical care and receiving substance abuse treatment. 

However, a growing conservative backlash is taking aim at this philosophy, both by removing encampments like the one at Navajo Wash and opposing the underlying policies they blame for allowing the camps to exist. Instead, they’re pushing cities to use the criminal justice system to bear down on homelessness, despite resistance from police and prosecutors who say the problem can’t be arrested away. They want cities to use criminal enforcement as a way to apply pressure to get unhoused people into treatment and off the streets. 

Republican legislators put Proposition 312 on the ballot. The measure would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred when cities maintain a “public nuisance” or show a pattern of not enforcing laws frequently invoked against unhoused people, like loitering or obstructing public thoroughfares. The legislation does not define what reasonable expenses could include, but proponents of the measure cite private security, surveillance systems and cleanups. No Democrats in the state legislature supported the measure, which cannot be vetoed if approved by voters.

By allowing penalties for governments who use Housing First strategies, Proposition 312 advances this ongoing, nationwide effort to dial up law enforcement as a response to homelessness. But critics worry the shift will strain resources and punish a population that needs support, ultimately proving counterproductive to getting people off the streets and into stable housing. 

Legal precedent has long held that it is not a crime to be homeless—though many cities had laws like bans on sleeping in public which were difficult or impossible to follow when unhoused. Until recently, a federal appellate court ruling provided legal guardrails, saying that, “as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

But this summer, in its ruling on City Of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those protections, clearing the way for policies and court battles pushing the country toward a more punitive handling of homeless encampments. 

In the ruling’s wake, state and local leaders nationwide have proved eager to ramp up tactics. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for example, issued an executive order, within a month of the ruling, authorizing sweeps on state-owned land. And in recent months, cities from Spokane, Washington, to Des Moines, Iowa, have added or expanded their own camping bans or resumed enforcement of existing ones.

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based think tank, submitted a legal brief in Grants Pass arguing that Housing First fails because many individuals do not want housing, “at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions or other poor lifestyle choices.” The organization suggested cities could arrest and incarcerate unhoused people to compel them to treat underlying issues. 

“Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” Goldwater’s filing reads. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.” 

Before it interceded in the Supreme Court case, the Goldwater Institute supported plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to clear The Zone, the large Phoenix encampment that sat between a cluster of county buildings and the state capital complex. Then it brought legislation to Republican Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen, who helped it through the legislature, and onto the state’s November ballot as Proposition 312.

Representatives from the Goldwater Institute declined to comment, but supporters of Proposition 312 say the goal is to compensate property owners who have spent money due to their city’s inadequate response to homelessness and prevent the development of more large-scale encampments like The Zone. 

“Prop 312 gives us hope that not only will the City of Phoenix not allow another ‘Zone’ to happen, but if so, there would be some compensation for small businesses like ours,” Debbie and Joe Faillace, former owners of a sandwich shop next to the encampment and plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city, wrote in support of the measure.

Proposition 312 does not clearly define what kinds of remedies are adequate to keep cities off the hook. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos in Pima County (Tucson), law enforcement responds to practically all nuisance complaints — but not always to the liking of residents and neighboring businesses. 

“The law does not say you must take them to the county jail every time. Once you call us, it is our choice. We look at it and consider, do we need to take them to jail for urinating on the side of a building, or do we need to give them a ticket, or do we just tell them to get out of here?” Nanos said. “I think they really want to force the hand of government to do what they want. But you cannot arrest away homelessness.”

The sheriffs who run the state’s largest jail systems, including Pima and Maricopa Counties, have overseen facilities marred by overcrowding, poor conditions a streak of deaths. Jails are already straining to provide mental health and addiction resources for detainees, whose needs outpace the availability of services, Nanos said.

Josh Jacobsen, a business owner and co-chair of the Tucson Crime Free Coalition, a group backing Proposition 312, insisted that the goal isn’t frequent sweeps, which, Jacobsen says, are harmful to the unhoused and do nothing to curb homelessness. Instead, he thinks the city should make arrests, so the criminal justice system can forcefully guide people toward services. 

“With the right amount of pressure, something can be done about it,” Jacobsen said. “The goal is that with the right touch, you can get people to take advantage of services.” 

The county runs several diversion programs, including a specialty court for addressing homelessness, which allow minor charges to be dropped after meeting certain conditions, such as completing an addiction recovery program, though prosecutors warn those programs have limited space. 

In most cases, there is little police can do to meaningfully address nuisance complaints tied to homelessness, said Joe Clure, a retired officer and executive director of the Arizona Police Association, a professional group representing police labor organizations in the state. 

“You do have to manage your human police resources to be most advantageous to community safety. Whether or not that is aggressively going after homeless nuisance violations — that probably would be better left to somebody else than police,” Clure said. “When there is a potential loss of revenue, governments take that very seriously. It probably would move those types of violations up on the priority list. … We will have to be more enforcement-minded.”

“I think they know that mental illness does not cause homelessness,” said Will Knight, decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He points instead to issues like stagnating wages, high housing costs and low housing vacancy rates. “But it’s a real easy myth to sell because of what’s the most visible parts of homelessness to most people in the community, who also themselves feel uncomfortable seeing it.” 

For decades, The Zone has been home to unsheltered people, but in recent years, a growing number slept on streets and sidewalks, in tents and other shelters cobbled together from palettes and tarps. Critics of Phoenix’s handling of The Zone accused the city of not enforcing laws against camping, obstructing thoroughfares and using illegal drugs—the same kinds of offenses whose non-enforcement would allow rebates under Proposition 312. 

Last fall, officials cleared The Zone from downtown after business and property owners, represented by the same law firm that led litigation to clear Navajo Wash, sued the city over lost business, employees and property value. Precisely how that clearing was dismantled was shaped by two major forces—one from inside the city’s bureaucracy and one from Washington, D.C.

In 2021, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Phoenix Police Department, not just for use of force and discriminatory policing, but, for the first time for any department, also how police handled unhoused people’s belongings. The investigation, released earlier this year, found city officials seized and destroyed unhoused people’s property without adequate notice or recourse. Police, who previously played a major role in encampment sweeps and cleanings, also regularly stopped, detained and arrested unhoused people—even when there wasn’t evidence of any crime.

While the investigation was underway, Phoenix created a new Office of Homeless Solutions in 2022. It expanded shelter capacity and developed a protocol for storing unattended property. This new office oversaw The Zone’s clearing.

The office cleared the encampment block-by-block, giving advance notice and connecting people with shelter, Rachel Milne, the city’s Homeless Solutions Director told Phoenix City Council in September. The city worked in a “humane and compassionate manner, offering everyone an indoor alternative place,” Milne said.

“In many circumstances, we are really reevaluating what public safety means,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said at a September city council meeting. Many calls for service that had gone to police now go to the Office of Homeless Solutions, a shift she said was called for by both progressive activists and police. “Sometimes the best person to offer help to a person isn’t an armed officer, but a social worker or mental health expert,” Gallego said. 

Even as the city tested this new approach, Maria Walter, an unhoused person who lived in The Zone, felt disrupted as she wondered where to go next as city officials cleared the area.

“It doesn’t feel good. I don’t feel any safety,” said Walter, who was one of the hundreds who had to leave as the city finished its months-long dismantling of The Zone.

In its final weeks, soon-to-be former residents tried to gather their belongings while city workers swept up what they left behind. On some already cleared blocks, people returned to sleep on the sidewalk, covered by cheap blankets, like the kind used to pad furniture when moving. 

As the city cleared the last block, people wheeled their belongings out in carts. Those headed to a shelter tried to fit their belongings into already overstuffed vehicles. “It’s time to drastically downsize,” a city worker advised. 

Phoenix then opened a sanctioned campground for some 300 people a few blocks away from The Zone, offering meals and services on-site. This year, the city opened a new shelter that allows people to stay with pets and partners and more storage for their belongings. Phoenix plans to add over 500 shelter beds by the end of 2025.

But even with efforts to open new shelters, Arizona still faces a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing, said Jamie Podratz, public policy advocate at the Arizona Housing Coalition. The coalition, which includes organizations and municipalities providing homeless services, opposes Proposition 312 because the refunds would take away money necessary to provide services that reduce homelessness. Emphasizing clearing encampments or enforcing nuisance laws would only displace unhoused people, and make it harder for them to access help, the coalition argues.

“What’s important is what we do from here—and that’s try to increase the supports available and increase the community response rather than pull away much needed resources to address it,” said Podratz.

Despite its win in the case, the legal battle over Navajo Wash pressured Tucson officials to use a firmer hand when dealing with encampments, especially since the decision has been sent to the Arizona Court of Appeals for review following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling, said Paul Gattone. A civil rights attorney who has worked on several lawsuits to block the city from displacing unhoused people, Gattone described how Tucson officials have closely monitored Navajo Wash to prevent drug use and ramped up enforcement across the city.

​​”It wasn’t much of a victory for the homeless because the city is still doing sweeps,” he said.

In late September, Tucson officials cleared an encampment at Santa Rita Park, a little over a mile southeast of downtown. The park has baseball diamonds, a skatepark and a growing population of unhoused people.

Leticia Valdez organized her belongings on a cart as police and the cleanup crew assembled. She had planned to stay up all night to prepare, but was too tired. She didn’t have a plan beyond moving her belongings across the street. “It’s just a hassle,” Valdez said. ”Some people don’t have nowhere to go.” 

The fight in Arizona is being replicated, in some form, across the country. 

In October, Florida enacted a law conceived by the Cicero Institute, a leading critic of Housing First, banning unhoused people from camping in public and allowing residents, businesses and state prosecutors to sue cities for not quickly clearing out encampments. Like Goldwater, Cicero petitioned the Supreme Court to eliminate protections of unhoused people in the Grants Pass case. 

Cicero has propagated aspects of its model legislation in states across the U.S. In Tennessee, sleeping on public property is a felony. Over the summer, Kentucky passed a law allowing property owners to use, in some cases, lethal force, against people shoplifting, trespassing or illegally camping. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Donald Trump has promoted camping bans except for sanctioned campgrounds. 

A proposition on California’s November ballot similarly uses the criminal justice system as a main tool for managing homelessness. The ballot measure ramps up criminal penalties for certain drug and theft offenses, but allows people charged with those crimes to avoid prison by completing an addiction or mental health treatment program. Breaking with Housing First advocates who hold that individuals with stable housing are more successful at treating behavioral health issues, proponents of the measure claim involuntary treatment works “because people who receive treatment have a much greater chance of staying housed,” according to the campaign’s website. 

Gattone, the Tucson civil rights attorney, argues that displacing a person violating the law simply for living outside doesn’t fix the problem, it just moves that problem someplace else. Arizona has thousands fewer shelter beds than unhoused people, meaning there is no feasible way for cities to enforce the law without simply sweeping people from one location to another.

“The answer to homelessness is housing,” Gattone said. “People have to live somewhere. They are not going to disappear.”

The post The Next Front in the Fight Over Homelessness Is on the Arizona Ballot appeared first on Bolts.

The Michigan Supreme Court struck back on Wednesday, finding that the legislature’s scheme to bypass the citizen initiatives was unconstitutional.

Michigan workers will soon reap major benefits from the ruling. In February, the minimum wage will increase by $2, and employers will be required to provide paid sick leave for all employees.

But the decision also provides a robust affirmation of direct democracy. The court’s Democratic majority stepped in to protect a process that has come under heavy assault in Michigan and elsewhere. 

The legislature’s actions “violated the people’s constitutionally guaranteed right to propose and enact laws through the initiative process,” Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote for the majority.

This Michigan ruling came two weeks after the Utah supreme court created new safeguards for direct democracy. There, too, the ruling rebuffed Republicans who had gutted a suite of citizen initiatives; Utah lawmakers don’t have carte blanche to just override any ballot measure, the court ruled.

State courts historically have affirmed only narrow protections for ballot measures. But as GOP-run states have aggressively overturned initiatives, and made it harder to place them on the ballot in the first place, some jurists have turned to state constitutions and argued that they strongly protect access to democracy. Welch nodded to this argument in her Michigan decision, when she evoked “our Constitution’s commitment to ‘the democracy principle.’” Proposing laws is a “power that the people reserved to themselves,” she wrote; this power “must ‘be saved if possible’ from ‘evasion or parry by the legislature.’”

People watching from other states now hope that the back-to-back rulings in Michigan and Utah inspires other state courts to also push back on encroachments.

“Although state courts do not have to follow decisions from other states, they often look to such decisions for guidance,” Derek Clinger, an attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative who contributed to an amicus brief that argued against Michigan lawmakers in this case, wrote in an analysis of the case.  “[This opinion] may therefore persuade courts in other states to not allow technicalities or machinations to frustrate the people’s initiative and referendum powers.”

Within Michigan, though, the future of this new commitment to direct democracy is uncertain.

The supreme court split along party lines to issue this 4-3 decision. The four Democratic justices formed the majority and the three Republican justices dissented. 

But the court could flip this November when two seats are up for grabs. Democratic Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who was appointed last year by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, is running to stay on the court. Voters will also fill the seat of a retiring Republican, Justice David Viviano.

The GOP would capture control of the court if it sweeps both seats this fall. And while there’s no guarantee how new justices would rule on a similar case in the future, the divide last week signals that a GOP majority would severely threaten this precedent.

When North Carolina’s supreme court flipped to the GOP in 2022, conservatives flexed their newfound power to quickly reverse precedents and steer a new course on democracy and voting rights cases.

Michigan Republicans will choose their two supreme court candidates at a convention in late August, and at least five people are hoping to grab these spots. (While parties choose their nominees for November, these candidates’ party affiliation does not show up on the ballot.) One contender, Matt DePerno, is a prominent purveyor of false conspiracy theories about rampant voter fraud. DePerno, the party’s failed attorney general nominee in 2022, pursued a legal case to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He was charged last year for tampering with election equipment. 

In recent years, major decisions by Michigan’s high court have often come down to a party-line split, raising the stakes of the November elections on issues beyond election law. In 2022, the court two years ago issued a string of 4-3 decisions that created new protections for youth from severe punishments. Just last week, the court found that the state cannot put people on the sexual offender registry for crimes that are nonsexual; that decision came in a 5-2 vote, with Justice Elizabeth Clement, a moderate Republican, joining her four Democratic colleagues.

The court has issued other recent decisions safeguarding ballot initiatives. Two years ago, Republicans on the State Board of Canvassers abruptly blocked two proposed constitutional amendments from making the ballot, flouting the recommendations of the Bureau of Elections that had determined that the measures had enough signatures. The court reinstated the amendments in a pair of 5-2 rulings that, again, saw Clement join four Democrats.

Clement stuck with the party in last week’s ruling, however. She wrote in a dissent that she did not think that the legislature’s actions were unconstitutional.

“There is certainly reason to be frustrated by the Legislature’s actions here: enacting laws proposed by initiative petition to avoid ballot approval only to substantially alter them in the same legislative session,” she wrote. “But nothing in Article 2, § 9 restricts the Legislature from doing so. And as tempting as it might be to step into the breach, this Court lacks the power to create restrictions out of whole cloth.”

This section of the Michigan constitution was drafted in 1913, and since then Michiganders have enjoyed the power to propose statutes of their own creation. Once organizers gather enough signatures to place a proposal on the ballot, the legislature has two basic options. It can either adopt the proposal as is, which means it becomes law without needing to go on the ballot. Or it can reject the statute; at that point, the measure goes to voters who can force its adoption. 

If voters adopt a measure, the legislature can’t get rid of it easily, as three fourths of lawmakers must agree to modify it. Republicans in 2018, who were very far from having such a supermajority, would have been boxed in if they’d let the minimum wage and sick leave measures go to voters. Instead, they chose a maneuver known as “adopt and amend;” they “adopted” the measures in September 2018, preventing citizens from voting on them, and then they “amended” their own laws on simple majority votes in December 2018. 

The legislature insisted it was following the law. It relied on a last-minute advisory opinion from Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette, who overturned a 1964 opinion by Democratic Attorney General Frank Kelley that such a maneuver was unconstitutional. 

Clement agreed with Schuette on Wednesday. If the legislature chooses to adopt a proposal, she wrote in her dissent, it can use its normal lawmaking power after that point to modify it as it pleases.

Welch’s majority opinion was thoroughly unconvinced. 

“It is difficult to fathom that the framers intended for voters to expend countless resources and time to gather thousands of signatures to place an initiative on the ballot only to have to do so all over again via a referendum after the Legislature adopts and then amends the initiative,” she wrote. 

Welch added, “Allowing the Legislature to bypass the voters and repeal the very same law it just passed in the same legislative session thwarts the voters’ ability to participate in the lawmaking process.”

The court’s decision comes with a major caveat. It only bars lawmakers from amending a measure within the same session in which they’ve adopted it. But they can still do it in a future session; the court took specific issue with “the lame duck legislators” who, in December 2018, “avoided the democratic accountability” that the constitution “was designed to provide.”

This keeps the door wide open to lawmakers adopting a proposed measure to keep it off the ballot one year—and then gutting it in the following calendar year. 

Still, it can get more difficult to repeal a law as time passes because people are more likely to be feeling its effects. The minimum wage measure that was poised to be on the 2018 ballot would have raised people’s wages starting on Jan. 1, 2019. Republicans rolled it back in December before the increase went into effect. Having to wait until early 2019 would have meant cutting people’s actual wages—a maneuver that would have been far less palatable politically.

Plus, the Democratic justices on Wednesday signaled that they’ll stay vigilant in the future—if they can keep their majority in November, that is. 

Welch in her opinion snapped at lawmakers’ attempt to thwart their constituents, writing, “The people bestow power unto the branches of government, not the other way around.”

The post Direct Democracy Scores a Win in Michigan’s High Court. Can It Survive November? appeared first on Bolts.

Utah lawmakers responded by rewriting if not gutting the three propositions. 

On redistricting, the GOP-led legislature repealed the measure’s centerpiece, a requirement that new maps be drawn by an independent commission. Freed from that constraint, lawmakers then proceeded in late 2021 to design a congressional map that eliminated the state’s only competitive district, “cracking” Salt Lake City into four to establish four reliably Republican seats. 

The Utah Supreme Court pushed back on Thursday, issuing a landmark and unanimous ruling that affirmed a vital right to direct democracy and restricted lawmakers’ ability to ignore that power. 

“We hold that when Utahns exercise their right to reform the government through a citizen initiative, their exercise of these rights is protected from government infringement,” Justice Paige Petersen wrote in her opinion.

The ruling comes with many limitations and caveats. It does not by itself strike down the GOP’s gerrymandered maps, which remain in use for now. It does not shield initiatives from all rollback. It doesn’t even apply to all ballot measures, just those that “reform the government.” Still, it gave Utahns a new tool to challenge legislators who disregard their initiatives. 

Until now, the legislature could do virtually whatever it wanted in response to citizen measures. Lawmakers will now face a tougher test when they try to modify measures that deal with government rules and structures, and organizers may feel greater confidence that the statutes they jumpstart have at least some protection.

“This is a historic ruling,” said Ben Phillips, a lawyer with Campaign Legal Center who took part in the case on behalf of plaintiffs. “The legislature cannot, in any way it wants, just repeal any initiative that the people pass.” This is the first time the court addressed whether Utahns have a basic right to change their government, Phillips explained, and it held that giving lawmakers carte blanche to override ballot measures “would render that fundamental right meaningless.”

The ruling comes as some GOP-led states like Arkansas and Idaho have pursued aggressive efforts to narrow the scope of direct democracy. New laws have made it harder to get initiatives on the ballot. Statewide officials have resisted routine steps to stall the process. And lawmakers have tried to raise the threshold for passage, while circumventing some successful measures.

In response, some proponents of the initiative process have turned to state constitutions to protect direct democracy. Many constitutions contain provisions that pertain to access to ballot initiatives, but many state courts have taken a narrow view of them. Mississippi justices even struck down the initiative process altogether in 2021. Idaho’s supreme court took a different path the same year, striking down a new Republican law that had restricted ballot measures in a decision that affirmed “the people’s fundamental right to legislate directly.”

As a result, organizations like Reclaim Idaho, whose success in pushing progressive measures like Medicaid expansion has angered GOP lawmakers in the state, have been able to place new measures on the ballot. Idahoans in November will decide on an initiative, again supported by Reclaim Idaho, that would move the state to a ranked-choice voting system. 

In Utah, voting rights groups reacted with anger to lawmakers’ ignoring Proposition 4, the 2018 initiative on redistricting. “When the Legislature did indeed do what they wanted anyway, they confirmed the beliefs of the discouraged, the cynical, all the people who believe their votes and their opinions don’t matter,” Catherine Weller, then president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, said in early 2022.

Several groups, including the League of Women Voters, filed a lawsuit that year against the new map. They argued that the new districts were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander; other state supreme courts have recognized partisan-gerrymandering claims, even as the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to. But these groups also raised another claim: that it was unconstitutional for lawmakers to just gut the 2018 redistricting initiative.

They rooted their claim in Article I, Section 2, of the Utah Constitution, which states that “the people” have “the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” The lawsuit argued that, in passing a statute to set up a new redistricting process, voters exercised their power to “alter or reform their government,” and that the legislature violated that right when it repealed the powers of the independent redistricting commission.

The state supreme court agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that Utahns have a right to “alter or reform their government.” Peterson wrote that “government-reform initiatives are constitutionally protected from unfettered legislative amendment, repeal, or replacement.”

While the ruling was immediately celebrated by voting rights groups, it also left much unresolved.

For one, the decision doesn’t protect all initiatives, only those that concern “government reform.” What exactly falls under that purview will likely be the subject of future litigation. Even then, the court said that lawmakers retain the power to change citizen initiatives; but changes cannot “impair the reforms” unless that impairment is “narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest.” 

This test, known as “strict scrutiny,” is generally difficult to meet. Still, whether changes are “narrowly tailored,” and whether lawmakers’ interest is “compelling,” is left to courts to decide.

The court did not even say whether Senate Bill 200—the specific legislation at issue in this case, with which lawmakers gutted Prop 4 and ended independent redistricting reform—crossed that line. It affirmed the people’s protected right to reform their government, but it did not provide any answer as to whether the GOP’s decision to gut the redistricting initiative violated that right.

Instead, they sent the case back to the trial court to hear arguments on that point, a process that will take a lot of additional time. (They also did not address whether the Utah Constitution bans partisan gerrymandering.)

The court has already drawn scrutiny for how long this case has dragged on: It heard arguments in July 2023 and waited roughly a year to issue a ruling. 

The delay, and their decision to send the case back to a district court, guarantees that the state will again elect its members of Congress this year under the same maps as in 2022, despite the allegation that they were unconstitutionally drawn. 

Still, if the lower court finds that Utah lawmakers lacked a “compelling government interest” in gutting the 2018 redistricting reform, it may end up reinstating that proposition, and the state’s maps would have to be redrawn in advance of the 2026 elections. 

There’d need to be plenty of additional litigation before any new districts are ordered. But on Thursday at least, advocates were hopeful that the court’s ruling would bring back redistricting reform and lead to fairer maps. 

Phillips, the Campaign Legal Center attorney, thinks the plaintiffs will win again in district court. He believes that a judge will find that GOP lawmakers’ law gutting Prop 4 fails strict scrutiny and reinstate the independent commission. “No matter what compelling interest [lawmakers] assert, it’s hard to imagine that completely gutting Prop 4 would be narrowly tailored,” he said. “The ruling is an important step in ensuring that Prop 4 is back in effect, with all of its provisions for independent redistricting.”

He added, “The bottom line is that we overcame an important hurdle on the way to fair maps.”

The post Utah’s Highest Court Safeguards the People’s Right to Direct Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

Getting a measure on the ballot is expensive and onerous, says Dawn Penich, a spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access, the organization behind this year’s measure. But her group is determined to champion it to restore abortion rights and overcome restrictions put in place by Arizona Republicans. They’ve raised over $12 million to recruit hundreds of volunteers, train them, and send them out to canvas in high-traffic areas under the blazing desert sun. Their goal: get at least 383,923 Arizonans who are registered to vote to sign a petition so it qualifies for the ballot. 

“It is grueling work,” Penich said. “I’m out in the field, on the streets, at trailheads with our volunteers many days a week.” 

“It’s folks who are oftentimes retired,” she added of the canvassers who are securing signatures. “It’s folks who are fitting this in before or after their full-time jobs. None of this is easy.”

The GOP is now pushing a separate constitutional amendment that would multiply those hurdles, and make future citizen-led initiatives prohibitively difficult.

Republican lawmakers have placed a measure on the November ballot that would severely restrict direct democracy in Arizona by imposing strict geographic requirements on where organizers must gather signatures. Arizonans will vote on it this fall, likely alongside the abortion measure. 

Penich warns that the amendment would make organizing like hers tougher going forward. “This is an effort to make it harder for regular people to engage in the process,” she told Bolts. 

Right now, petitioners need to pass just one statewide test to qualify a measure: They need to gather more signatures than a minimum number defined in the state constitution, regardless of where the signatures come from. (The threshold is 10 or 15 percent of all votes cast in the most recent governor’s race, depending on whether the proposal would amend the constitution.) 

If the new measure passes, it would create 30 separate tests instead: Initiatives would need to meet that same threshold of signatures in each and every one of Arizona’s 30 legislative districts.

This would require tremendous logistical feats from any citizen-led effort. Canvassers would need to dramatically scale up their presence in the most remote parts of Arizona, unable to rely on high-traffic areas and denser population centers. 

Arizonans who have experience working on signature-gathering told Bolts that this requirement could prove insurmountable to them given the resources and capacity it would call for.

“This is nothing but a backdoor way to shut down the initiative process,” said Jim Barton, an election law attorney who has been involved in numerous legal fights over the rules of initiatives in Arizona. 

Proponents of this change say it is necessary to ensure rural Arizonans have a voice in the process; they say citizen-led initiatives are typically pushed by voters in Maricopa and Pima Counties, the state’s two most populous.

“It shows up on the ballot with very little buy-in from other parts of the state,” Republican state Senator J.D. Mesnard, who sponsored the amendment, Senate Concurrent Resolution 1015, told Bolts.

SCR 1015 passed both chambers of the legislature on party-line votes, with Republicans in support.

Mesnard added that he wants to reel in out-of-state groups that have zeroed in on Arizona as a key battleground state. “We’ve been seeing an increased use of the initiative process by outside organizations that don’t even exist in Arizona coming in and planting themselves in Maricopa County and gathering all the signatures they need,” Mesnard said.

Sarah Gonski, an Arizona-based lawyer who has represented Democrats in election litigation, predicts that the changes will have the opposite effect. Between the operational expenses of recruiting and training canvassers across every part of the state, and the legal expenses needed to defend the signatures in court, she told Bolts that only those with deep pockets could qualify a ballot initiative.

“Initiatives are going to be even more expensive. That means as a tool, it is even more inaccessible to actual citizens of Arizona,” said Gonski, who also teaches election law at ASU and works as a policy advisor for the Institute for Responsive Government. “It pretty much boxes out grassroots Arizona groups and ensures only well-monied special interests can come in and campaign.”

The geographic requirements in SCR 1015 would force organizers to deploy extensive resources to find thousands of supporters in regions that may be politically hostile to their agenda; while Arizona overall is closely divided, some areas skew very blue or red. (Joe Biden and Donald Trump each received more than 70 percent in at least one legislative district in the last presidential election.)

Even when organizers believe they’ve collected enough signatures, their opponents would simply have to show that they missed the mark in just one of the state’s 30 districts for the entire initiative to be scrapped. This would open more opportunities for legal mischief, and multiply courtroom battles. 

Pinny Sheoran, president of the League of Women’s Voters of Arizona, which opposes the proposed changes to the initiative process, agrees that these changes would lock out most Arizonans from a process in which they’ve grown used to participating.

“The ruling minority doesn’t want to share the power with the public,” Sheoran said.

The left doesn’t have a monopoly on popular initiatives, but in Arizona, where the state government has been run by Republicans for much of the last few decades, the direct democracy process has been a rare tool progressives can use to champion some of their most popular priorities. 

Voters approved a minimum wage increase in 2016, they legalized recreational marijuana in 2020, and they approved a hike in teachers’ salaries and education funding through raising taxes on top earners in 2020. (That last measure was eventually struck down by state courts.)

All these measures were initiated by Arizona organizations looking to circumvent the legislature. Other citizen-led initiatives have fueled reforms to the political system. A 1998 initiative set up public campaign funding with an eye to diminishing the power of special interests. A ballot measure in 2000 stopped gerrymandering by setting up an independent redistricting commission. A 2022 measure required groups making independent expenditures to disclose the identity of major donors.

Facing this string of victorious progressive campaigns, Republican politicians began chipping away at Arizonans’ right to put measures on the ballot.

In 2017, a law adopted by the GOP over Democratic objections made it easier for signatures to be challenged in court. The law set a higher standard of “strict compliance” that a voter’s signature must meet when compared to voter registration files. This has made it more likely for signatures to be tossed or declared invalid based on technicalities like a voter using an shortened version of their name. 

Republicans said the requirement would protect against fraud, but Penich says the law unleashed a deluge of pricey legal battles to strike signatures on formatting issues, misspellings, illegible characters and other minor details on petitions. “What most people would consider a really ridiculous detail could invalidate rows of signatures,” Penich said. “For instance, if somebody’s signature… touches the signature below it, that could be grounds to invalidate both signatures.”

As a result of the tightened standards, campaigns have to set aside more funds to defend the petitions in court, and they also have to invest more time in training circulators to minimize the number of signatures that may end up being tossed.

“Not only is it 110 degrees, not only is it after a full day of work while their families are at home,” Penich said, “we also have to be watching like a hawk while they sign that they stay inside the box, that they don’t leave out the date.”

Mesnard, the state senator behind SCR 1015, also supported the strict compliance law back in 2017.  

“If you are bypassing the normal process, it should be pretty strict,” he told Bolts this month. “If that means there should be fewer things on the ballot, then it might mean a healthier situation than what we had before.”

Another change that has made it harder to qualify initiatives is a provision tucked into a broad law that passed in 2014 with wide bipartisan support. It allows groups suing to challenge a petition to subpoena individual canvassers who sought out signatures for it; if a circulator does not show up to testify in court, all the signatures they collected are tossed out. 

In 2018, a group opposed to a clean energy initiative filed a string of subpoenas against roughly 1,400 canvassers as part of a lawsuit alleging that the petition violated Arizona’s strict compliance standards. The petition’s organizers have said it cost them over $1.3 million to bring all these circulators to court, including costs of flights, lodging, and missed wages. 

“The court let them do it, even though you could never get testimony from so many witnesses,” said Barton, the attorney who litigated the case. The clean energy initiative eventually did get enough signatures verified to qualify for the ballot, though it ultimately lost that year. Another petition drive didn’t even make it that far: Organizers of an initiative to outlaw dark money were hit by mass subpoenas, and thousands of signatures were tossed because circulators did not show up in court. 

The Arizona supreme court blessed this subpoena rule in a 2018 ruling. 

Terry Goddard, a former Democratic attorney general who was behind the dark money initiative, warned that the ruling created a very high barrier of entry for direct democracy. “You not only have to get valid signatures but then you have to keep the circulator around and have them appear at a hearing or all their signatures are going to be determined invalid,” he said at the time. 

Critics of this system filed a federal lawsuit, but they eventually withdrew their claims after losing in court. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who at the time served as secretary of state, defended the subpoena system in a court filing, saying it did not pose an undue burden.

These restrictions on direct democracy—the strict compliance test, the subpoena rules—are still in place. And Barton warns they will get even harder to overcome if SCR 1015 passes this fall. 

A ballot petition is virtually certain to have less room for error in some individual districts than it does statewide, and opponents would target canvassers in the district where a petition gathered the fewest supporters. Organizers would need to invest in collecting extra signatures in each district, going far beyond the minimum threshold to create buffers in all 30 without exceptions.

“They don’t need to knock off hundreds of thousands of signatures,” Barton said. “They just need to knock off a few thousand in one district.”

Arizona Republicans have also sought to close off other threats to their hold on power. In 2016, they expanded the Arizona supreme court, granting then-Governor Doug Ducey additional appointments that cemented a conservative majority. The maneuver helped lock in the right-wing majority that ruled in favor of abortion restrictions earlier this year.

The bill to expand the court was sponsored by Mesnard, who at the time was in the state House.

Democrats have gained power in recent years in Arizona. Hobbs narrowly flipped the governor’s mansion in 2022, breaking the GOP’s trifecta. This year, Democrats are also aiming to flip control of the state legislature for the first time since 1966. 

In such a scenario, Gonski predicts, Republicans may end up regretting making it so hard to pass initiatives. “In the not-too-distant future, conservative groups could be the ones turning to direct democracy measures,” she said. “And they would have made it very difficult and expensive for them.” 

“The political context is going to change probably in a way that makes this a boomerang they’re throwing into the wind that will come back and hit them in the face a couple years from now,” she added.

Arizona Republicans’ push to curtail direct democracy mirrors the party’s current efforts in a string of other states to set up additional hurdles for citizen-led initiatives. 

This includes reforms in several states to create or toughen geographic requirements for signatures. Last year, Arkansas Republicans passed a law that required organizers to gather signatures in at least 50 of the state’s 75 counties—up from 15. Voters had rejected such a change when it was proposed to them as a referendum in 2022, but the legislature passed it through a regular bill anyway.

“The grassroots people are going to be screwed,” David Crouch, an Arkansas attorney who had helped spearhead a medical marijuana referendum in the state, told Bolts at the time. 

In total, sixteen states impose some geographic requirements on petitions, but the scheme proposed in Arizona would be the strictest in the country, according to research compiled by Ballotpedia, a digital resource for elections information. In nearly all states with geographic mandates, the requirement is that signatures be gathered from some portion of counties or districts—not from every single one. The only state that allows no exception, Colorado, applies that rule only for constitutional amendments; Arizona’s would apply it to any initiative, including statutory changes.

“It is a minority veto,” Gonski said of the proposed change in Arizona. “It’s allowing people from one part of the state to veto something the majority of the state cares enough about to put on the ballot.”

Arizona for Abortion Access says their abortion rights measure had collected more than 500,000 signatures as of early April, already far more than what it’d need to qualify the item under current rules, and they were continuing to seek supporters. But if something goes wrong with their proposal this year while the GOP succeeds at restricting popular initiatives, abortion rights’ proponents warn that a redo would be exceedingly difficult.

“It has always been a very heavy lift, very hard work with ballot initiatives,” said Sheoran of the League of Women Voters. “But this is precisely why the Arizona Abortion Access campaign is so critical to have passed now.” 

“If this [geographic requirement] initiative passes, a second go-around of an abortion amendment would never happen,” she added. “Every woman knows that. We know how serious this is.”

The post Arizona Republicans Set Up a Ballot Measure to Squash Future Ballot Measures appeared first on Bolts.

With the state’s Republican officials refusing to expand the program as provided by the Affordable Care Act, leaving hundreds of thousands in the lurch, Taylor had hoped that a ballot initiative powered by the signatures of tens of thousands of citizens would break the logjam, as it had in other states. “We wanted to take it out of the hands of the legislators and put it into the hands of the people,” recalls Taylor, who leads the state chapter of the NAACP. “I felt confident that it was going to pass.”

His hopes were dashed by the court. At issue: The state constitution requires that a citizen-led initiative collect signatures in all five of the state’s congressional districts; the language was adopted in 1992, before Mississippi lost a congressional seat in the 2000 reapportionment, and it now only has four. The court said in May 2021 that, since there were no longer five districts in which to collect signatures, no initiative could be valid.

The ruling was as literal as it gets; “it stretches the bounds of reason,” complained a dissenting justice. Nevertheless, it brought the petitioning to expand Medicaid and other efforts like it to a screeching halt. And state officials have not fixed the issue in the intervening years. Many GOP leaders have said they want to revive initiatives; but the schemes they’ve proposed have been restrictive—requiring that initiatives receive a supermajority and prohibiting them from ever affecting abortion, for instance—and even those haven’t passed.

This year, again, lawmakers spent months debating bills that would have brought back initiatives in this watered-down form. But the effort faltered for good this week. 

A legislative deadline passed on Tuesday that confirmed that all these bills are dead for the year. David Parker, a Republican senator who chairs a key committee, had indicated two weeks ago that the chamber was done considering the issue in 2024.

As a result, Mississippi will spend at least one additional year with no initiatives, despite the state constitution’s promise that residents shall have a right to direct democracy.

“We desperately need a citizen-driven process to put something on the ballot,” Taylor said. “Citizens being able to have the ability to exercise their rights, being able to impact law when possible, is crucial.” 

Lawmakers still haven’t expanded Medicaid. Legislation to do so is closer than ever in the current session, with each chamber passing its own bill, but obstacles remain. Taylor regrets that it’s been impossible all these years to just ask voters if they want this. “The coverage gap is just truly a life and death issue,” he said. “More lives can continue to be lost unnecessarily.” 

The halting of initiatives in Mississippi for the past three years adds to the recent erosion of direct democracy, typically at the hands of GOP politicians. Republicans have recently made it far harder to qualify measures for the ballot in at least Arkansas, South Dakota, and Utah. Similar proposals are on the table right now in Arizona, Idaho, and Missouri. 

In addition, Bolts reported that Republican attorneys general in several states like Arkansas and Montana are routinely using procedural tricks to delay petition drives; Democratic city leaders in Atlanta used similar tactics over the last year to stall a local referendum on the so-called Cop City police training center. Republicans have also tried to raise the threshold needed to pass an initiative once it reaches voters, unsuccessfully in Ohio and South Dakota over the last two years. 

In most of these instances, the GOP was retaliating against ballot measures the party opposes on high-profile issues like abortion, Medicaid, and redistricting. In Mississippi, the 2021 lawsuit that ended up striking down initiatives was aimed at Initiative 65, a measure voters overwhelmingly adopted in 2020 to legalize medical marijuana. 

This year, Mississippi’s two legislative chambers each passed a bill to bring back initiatives. The House approved Concurrent Resolution 11 in January; it died in a Senate committee on Tuesday, which was the deadline for a bill originating in one chamber to get out of a committee in the other. The Senate, meanwhile, approved Senate Bill 2770 in March; a procedural motion killed it within days.

Democracy advocates who talked to Bolts are frustrated that there won’t be a solution in 2024, but they’re not upset at the failure of these specific bills: Rather than restore the process in place as of 2021, the measures would have revived initiatives only to make them exceedingly difficult to qualify and pass, using the same limitations that Republicans have introduced in Arkansas, Ohio, and elsewhere. 

They would have banned ballot measures from addressing abortion, suppressing the issue that has sparked massive progressive organizing. They would also have prohibited citizens from amending the state constitution, which would have left a large swath of other issues out of bounds. For instance, Mississippi’s harsh rules on felony disenfranchisement are codified in its state constitution; changing them, a priority for voting rights groups, requires a constitutional amendment. 

The bills would have also required organizers to collect more signatures than used to be the case, ramping up the money and resources needed to qualify a proposal. Finally, they would have dramatically increased the threshold a measure must clear at the polls to be adopted. The House set it at 60 percent, up from 50. The Senate would have gone even further and set it at an unusually high 67 percent.

“It was a scam,” said Paloma Wu, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice who works on democracy cases. “They tried to give the people a cheap ass version of what their powers were.”

Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi, called the bills to revive the ballot measure process “absurd” and “a joke.” He told Bolts that they would have made it “very much impossible for somebody to be able to get a ballot initiative through.”

Two Republican lawmakers who shaped this year’s legislative debates—Parker, who chairs the Senate’s Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency Committee, and state Representative Fred Shanks—did not respond to Bolts’ requests for comment. 

Parker made the decision to not move the bills in the Senate, saying they lacked the votes to pass. He also supported changes like implementing the 67-percent threshold. He said that he wanted to balance his support for initiatives with preventing out-of-state funders from bankrolling policy changes in Mississippi.

Shanks expressed disappointment at Parker’s decision to drop the issue. “The House stands on pushing the ballot initiative back to the people,” he said last month. In shepherding his measure through the House, he supported adding restrictions like a ban on bringing up abortion. 

Many Democratic lawmakers objected to the new limits. They pushed for a clean solution instead: legislation to bring back the process as it existed in 2021, simply changing the state constitution’s assumption that the state has five congressional districts to reflect the number it currently has. 

Hannah Williams, policy director of Mississippi Votes, a state advocacy group that has played a leading role in trying to fix this issue, says her organization will continue pressuring lawmakers heading into 2025 to bring back ballot initiatives. 

“We need more individuals to help us lobby their legislators, to make sure that the things that we want to be able to put on the ballot are protected,” Williams said. Her organization’s goal, she says, is to educate the public as to who is responsible for this predicament and why the proposed solutions were so inadequate.

She hopes to show lawmakers that this is not a partisan issue, since initiatives can be a tool for groups with any political goals. 

“I feel like sometimes it gets wrapped up in a ‘this is a left versus right’ thing,” she said. “But the conservative people that we work with, they have issues that they want to be able to put on the ballot too, and us not having a process is hindering really everybody’s right to democracy across the board.”

The state’s GOP leaders have paid lip service to the goal of restoring direct democracy, including during the 2023 elections that saw Republicans retain full control of the state government. But for Dortch, the legislature’s behavior this year is yet more confirmation that politicians just aren’t sincere about wanting to revive an initiative process. 

“No one wants to come out and say they don’t want one,” he said.

Mississippi lawmakers are not up for reelection until 2027. This year, the three justices who dissented in the 6-3 decision striking down initiatives in 2021 must run for reelection this fall, though only one of them—James Kitchens—drew any opposition. Justice Dawn Beam, who joined the majority, is also seeking reelection. 

Mississippi holds its elections in the shadow of other restrictions on democracy. Just this week, the state House killed a bill that would have set up in-person early voting; the state is one of only four with no early voting. Mississippi also strictly limits how to vote by mail. “If you’re not there from between 7am and 7pm on Election Day, it’s going to be pretty difficult for you to vote in our state,” Dortch said. 

In addition, Mississippi has one of the nation’s highest rates of individuals banned from voting due to a felony conviction; the state’s rules on lifetime disenfranchisement were designed in 1890 during an explicitly white supremacist constitutional convention. 

Taylor, the NAACP director, says that the refusal to revive ballot initiatives is part and parcel of the broader schemes that are suppressing people’s voices. “This is 100 percent intentional.” 

“The state of Mississippi, as long as there’s been a state, there has always been a segment of people that have been disenfranchised,” he added. “You have people who want to carry this into future generations.”

The post Mississippi Keeps the Door Firmly Shut on Ballot Initiatives appeared first on Bolts.

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. 

By the time the dust settled from all this legal back and forth and 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.