Ballot Measure-o-meter

Following an election cycle marked by state agencies spreading misinformation and using official offices to intimidate public media in order to defeat an abortion rights ballot initiative, House Bill 727 would further prevent state employees from using their official authority to influence elections.

Currently under consideration by Hawai’i legislators, Senate Bill 1225 would require simple majority support to pass a ballot measure. At present, over votes (when a voter mistakenly fills in both Yes and No bubbles) or a blank vote (when a voter skips the measure) are both counted as ‘No’ votes — essentially requiring a measure to earn supermajority support in order to succeed.

House Joint Resolution 87 looks to bring the People’s Tool to Texas, granting citizens the right to a ballot initiative process. Voters in the Lone Star State are currently only permitted to weigh in on legislatively-referred constitutional amendments following a 1914 election that was largely limited — both in right and access — to wealthy white male voters.

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.

Arizona’s Republican-controlled House has advanced HCR 2057, an anti-direct democracy measure that would require citizen-led initiative campaigns to collect signatures from all 15 counties in order to put a measure on the ballot. This comes after a similar measure that was pushed by GOP lawmakers, Prop. 134, failed in November when 58% of voters rejected it.

Recently passed by Arkansas legislators, Senate Bill 207 requires canvassers to remind petition signers that petition fraud is a Class A misdemeanor or risk being charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Sen. Jamie Scott (D-North Little Rock) named SB 207 and similar anti-initiative proposals as being a form of voter suppression not unlike the literacy tests and poll taxes that historically targeted marginalized communities.

Senate Bill 1027 seeks to bar ballot initiative campaigns from collecting more than 10% of their signatures from any single county with more than 400,000 voters — effectively silencing the voices of would-be petition signers in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

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.”