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.

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.

But Ramos, who directs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that promotes good government, says he may not volunteer in the future if voters approve Question 2, a constitutional amendment on the state’s April 2 ballot. “This thing gets passed, and I’d be very afraid to do that again,” he told Bolts.

The measure would require that only “an election official designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections or referendums.” It can easily read as an innocuous codification of existing statute, and it has generated no campaign spending on either side of the issue since Republican lawmakers chose to place it on the ballot late last year.

Among advocates for voting rights and for well-resourced election administration, however, this under-the-radar proposal is alarming. A slew of lawyers, elections experts, and nonprofit leaders tell Bolts Question 2 is written so vaguely as to invite lawsuits over what constitutes a “task” and what, exactly, it means to help “conduct” an election. 

They fear this confusion will have a chilling effect on the many non-governmental groups and volunteers who assist in election administration. If it passes, the measure is set to go into effect this year, ahead of November’s presidential election in which Wisconsin is again considered a critical swing state.

Victoria Bassetti, an expert on election law who has been involved in Wisconsin politics for three decades, believes this amendment would call into question the legality of any number of actions that these volunteers and outside organizations routinely perform in aid of the nearly 2,000 county and municipal clerks who run Wisconsin’s elections. 

“It adds pretty substantial burdens and legal doubts onto the shoulders of hardworking local election administrators, who, faced with this new provision, are going to see help that they previously relied upon fade away, are going to face substantial litigation risks, and are going to be unable to call upon expert advice and help from a variety of fields, including IT, security, and ballot design,” said Bassetti, a senior advisor at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ballot access. 

“I do feel like people are treating it like an afterthought, but Question 2 is a big deal,” said Eileen Newcomer, who leads voter education efforts for the League of Women Voters in Wisconsin, “and the way that this question is phrased does lead to a lot of uncertainty about how it would be enforced.”

This measure appears alongside Question 1, a related constitutional amendment that would ban election offices in the state from accepting or spending money donated by outside, non-governmental groups. Both measures are part of the continued fallout of the 2020 presidential election, and the conspiracies about widespread election fraud that have characterized Republican politics—especially in Wisconsin—ever since. Democratic state lawmakers unanimously opposed placing Questions 1 and 2 on the ballot, arguing that the state should better finance elections before restricting outside aid.

Question 1 responds to a controversy that emerged in the fall of 2020, when a previously low-profile nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed about $350 million, donated by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, to local elections offices around the country to assist in election administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These local offices, many underfunded and understaffed already, were scrambling at the time to outfit poll workers with personal protective equipment, establish drive-through voting, and process record levels of mail-in ballots.

Republicans were and still are outraged at the influx of cash, and have argued consistently that the donors intended to benefit liberal areas and boost turnout by Democrats, despite a lack of evidence of such favoritism or interference. Three and a half years on, this country’s response to the donation has been resounding: 27 states, most of which went for Donald Trump in 2020, have adopted bans on private funding for election administration. It would now hardly be groundbreaking if Wisconsin passes a ban of its own and becomes the 28th. (Wisconsin would have already joined this list, but for a veto by Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2021.)

While Question 1 confronts outside money, Question 2 would affect the outside labor that goes into making elections run smoothly. 

Among many examples of people who could arguably run afoul of the law if Question 2 passes, elections experts told Bolts, are representatives of voting-machine companies who commonly help troubleshoot during elections. And what about outside organizations who perform routine data analysis for local elections offices? Newcomer said that such work helps clerks decide how to spend limited resources—where to establish polling places, how to disperse staff, and so on.

Said Sam Liebert, a former clerk in three different small Wisconsin communities, “Some of these clerks are in towns and villages of 100 or 200 people, and they run elections out of living rooms and kitchens, and they have their 8-year-old daughters helping lick envelopes to send out absentee ballots. Where does this stop?”

Liebert, who now directs the Wisconsin branch of the national nonprofit advocacy group All Voting is Local, was leading elections in a town of about 12,000 people outside of Milwaukee during the 2020 cycle, and he said he relied on the assistance of folks who, under Question 2, could be seen as lacking the legal authorization to do that work in the future.

About 3,000 people in his town had requested absentee ballots that year for the November general election, and Liebert said he and his small staff could not alone have gotten the ballots sent out on time. He called in help from the town’s Parks and Recreation director and foreman, he said, and from technicians who are normally tasked with cleaning and maintaining park bathrooms and infrastructure. “We had an assembly line, getting ballots into envelopes and mail machines and getting them stamped,” Liebert said.

Wisconsin law already vests in local elections officials the power and responsibility to hire and train poll workers, and to discharge them if they break the law. Republicans who control the state legislature want to build upon this and turn the policy into a constitutional provision that could only be undone with another statewide vote.

But the law also has specific rules for who does and doesn’t qualify to be a poll worker; state statute lays out residency requirements and commands that workers undergo training before assisting in elections.

Should Question 2 pass, experts told Bolts, local clerks would have to be careful in deciding whom to call upon for help, and in making sure to remember to swear in as a poll worker anyone who performs a “task” of election administration—lest they slip up and find themselves lead characters in lawsuits. 

But it won’t be enough, Bassetti said, for clerks to simply err on the side of caution by administering an oath of office whenever they fear they’re in a gray area. She said many would not meet the standards set by state statute, listing a wide range of workers she fears would be affected: “the IT consultant who’s there to help you troubleshoot, the security person who’s there to help you, the friendly school person who wants to help you organize things, or the ballot-design person helping you fit 17 things onto one sheet of paper,” among others.

During debate over the measures in November in the state Senate, Republican Senator Eric Wimberger argued this step was made necessary by foul play in Green Bay in 2020. Faced with extraordinary demands to execute an election amid a raging pandemic, the Green Bay city council created an ad hoc elections committee, which agreed to take $1.6 million from the Center for Civic and Tech Life, and also invited the guidance of several outside experts who helped the city plan for and hold its general election that year.

Green Bay’s clerk, however, clashed with that outside aid and wound up resigning, arguing she’d been marginalized by city leaders who favored outside expertise over her own.

The election was carried out without any reported irregularities. In a report issued in April of 2021, Green Bay’s city attorney absolved the city of any wrongdoing in the administration of the 2020 election, and furthermore found that the outside aid was much-needed. The report details intense challenges in Green Bay leading up to the election, with city officials overwhelmed and ill-equipped. “There was no way for the City to react to the changes brought on by the pandemic without the infusion of funding,” the report stated.

Three years after that report, the Green Bay episode remains the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, and is a primary motivator for Question 2 supporters in the legislature. Wimberger, who represents Green Bay, alleged from the Senate floor that in 2020 “activists orchestrated the fall election and acted as a city clerk would act, though paid by [the Center for Civic and Tech Life], including managing staff and having access to ballots.” He went on to suggest that the outside aid made Wisconsin’s 2020 election results untrustworthy. “Whether the actual ballots were altered or advantages went to one side remains unclear,” he said. “Suspicions remain.”

During that same Senate debate, Democratic legislators argued that Wisconsin Republicans were putting the state in an impossible position by both declining to substantially increase funding for local elections and limiting the ability of local administrators to seek help.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Democratic Senator Mark Spreitzer said. “You can either provide public funding for elections, or you can let clerks go out and find the resources they need to cover the gap. But you can’t choose neither.”

Advocates told Bolts the vagueness of Question 2 in particular could prove to be a feature, not a bug, for Republicans: by creating new avenues to prosecute people in election administration, they create opportunities to sow distrust and chaos.

“This only plays into the narrative that our system is broken, by making it more broken,” Liebert said. 

That narrative has taken hold in prominent corners of Wisconsin politics. For one, court documents recently showed, lawyers in Wisconsin were central to Donald Trump’s effort to create a “cloud of confusion” in attempting to overturn election results in 2020. Since then, some law enforcement officials in Wisconsin have tried to use the powers of their office to investigate the elections, as Bolts has reported.

And election deniers continue to have sway in Wisconsin. A fake elector for Trump sits on the state’s election commission; another, Bill Feehan, is running for office in LaCrosse County in April. Trump supporters are also now trying to force a recall of Robin Vos, the staunchly conservative sitting Republican speaker of the Wisconsin House, over concerns Vos hadn’t done enough to help them decertify the state’s 2020 results. 

David Canon, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin, joined several others interviewed for this story in predicting that the exact boundaries set by Question 2 will have to be clarified in court, should the amendment pass. He identified several types of routine elections work that could feature in lawsuits challenging election results.

For example, Canon said, “What about helping disabled voters? Under state law a disabled person can have someone take them to the polling place and be with them when they vote. I think there will be a lot of people in the gray area who will have to be sorted out by subsequent litigation.” 

This would all be avoided, of course, if Question 2 fails—but Wisconsin politicos told Bolts they’d be shocked by that outcome. In the absence of organized opposition, many of them said, the amendment should appeal to a wide swath of voters who take its language at face value and may miss the intentions of the measure’s authors. 

“You have some folks that were pushing both of these constitutional amendments that are looking to try and sow seeds of doubt on our elections,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, by folks who’ve been pushing to poke and prod, and who’ll poke and prod some more now.”

The post Ballot Measure May Scare Away the People Who Help Run Wisconsin Elections 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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