Ballot Measure-o-meter

Lawmakers in Alabama are hoping to bring the People’s Tool to the state’s voters. House Bill 14 would give citizens the right to propose ballot initiatives for both constitutional amendments and general laws.

Voters approved pair of legislatively-referred measures, to support the state’s Healthy School Meals for All program and the SNAP federal food assistance program for low-income families following cuts made by Congress. Hunger Free Colorado estimates that the Healthy School Meals for All program saves a family as much as $1,250 per child every year. 

Passed this spring by Ohio voters, the legislatively-referred Issue 2 extends the State Capital Improvement Program and increases its annual spending cap from $200 million to $250 million. This program provides funding to local governments (e.g. towns, counties, etc) to build or repair critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, water supply, sanitation, and more.

Voters approved a legislatively-referred measure to allow Washington’s WA Cares fund (a payroll tax-funded, state-run program providing each Washingtonian $36,500 in long-term care benefits) to be invested in stocks and equities. Sent to the ballot with bipartisan support, the measure comes amid growing recognition of WA Cares’ financial scale and long-term potential.

A citizen-led effort to protect direct democracy in Arkansas was twice blocked by the state’s attorney general using a new law new state law that requires ballot measures be written at or below an 8th grade reading level. Passed by the legislature earlier this spring, House Bill 1713 relies on a controversial tool to determine if a measure is written with too much complexity based on syllable count and sentence length. According to an attorney and drafter of the Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment, “If I say right instead of fundamental right, there’s a lot less syllables there and that drops my readability score, but I’m not being as transparent and open and honest with the public about what we’re actually doing,” Standerfer said. The reading level requirement is just one example of the many attempts by Arkansas lawmakers to attack the state’s ballot initiative process and proof-positive of the need to defend Arkansans’ right to direct democracy.

House Bill 45 not only prohibits any sort of indirect or direct foreign funding for ballot measures, it prohibits campaign donations from any organization or company that’s received more than $100k total from a foreign entity in the past four years. 

North Dakota’s House of Representatives is proposing a constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters, would create a single-subject rule for all future ballot measures in the state. Advocates for direct democracy have raised concerns that the amendment would give state officials a disproportionate amount of power to approve or deny changes to the constitution and would inevitably lead to more legislative and litigation-related hurdles to passing citizen-initiated measures.

The passage of Senate Bill 73 means that citizen-led ballot initiative campaigns will now be required to publish their measure in at least one newspaper in every county in the state for 60 days preceding an election — at an estimated cost of $1.4 million.

House Bill 1205 is making it nearly impossible for grassroots groups to put an initiative on Florida’s statewide ballot: requiring ballot initiative sponsors to post a $1 million bond payable to the Division of Elections, creating a complicated signature verification process that will burden elections offices, imposing stricter deadlines on the petition process with costly fines — and more extremist restrictions. Citing House Bill 1205’s unprecedented attacks against the ballot initiative process, Florida Decides Healthcare announced its plan to shift their campaign to expand the state’s Medicaid program to 2028.

Mainers have defeated a dangerous anti-voting initiative that would have eliminated two days of absentee voting, terminated ongoing absentee status for seniors and people with disabilities, required voters to present photo ID when voting in-person or by absentee ballot, and more. Maine historically has one of the highest rates of voter participation in the nation — a distinction that could easily have been threatened by this initiative.

Slipped into a special session otherwise meant to focus on illegal gerrymandering, House Joint Resolution 3 seeks to severely undermine the state’s citizen-led ballot initiatives. The proposed amendment would require that initiatives be passed by a majority of voters in each of Missouri’s congressional districts — making it the highest vote threshold in the country. If voters approve the law, as few as 5% of opposing voters could defeat a ballot initiative.

Senate Bill 1027 is an especially restrictive anti-direct democracy measure that severely limits how many signatures can be counted from any single county for ballot initiative petitions. The law  will take power away from rural and urban voters alike: in the state’s smallest county, for example, a maximum of 152 voters could have their petition signatures counted.

Sen. Regina Goodwin (D-Tulsa) remarked, “It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. This is not about transparency. This is about suppressing a process.”