GOP targets ballot initiatives with more than 80 voting bills to suppress process
This post was originally published on this site
Journalist Spenser Mestel tweeted a photo on Wednesday of South Dakota Democrat Rueben Engelhart holding a 2018 ballot measure petition that stretched from his chin to his shins. “Per a new law in South Dakota, canvassers must collect signatures on the same single sheet of paper as the full text of the initiative — and the font can be no smaller than size 14,” Mestel said in the tweet. “It’s part of a wider Republican-led war on ballot initiatives.”
Gov. Kristi Noem signed legislation requiring the larger font size into law last year, and South Dakota Republicans as well as those in about a dozen other states are hardly stopping there when it comes to restricting the ballot initiative process.
RELATED STORY: Explainer: What is a ballot initiative?
Last year alone, 146 bills were introduced to restrict that process, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a liberal advocacy organization. “After progressive issues like #MinimumWage won at the ballot in 2016 and 2018, you started to see an increase in state legislatures trying to make them less accessible,” Chris Melody Fields, executive director of the organization, tweeted.
In 2016, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington pushed through ballot measures to raise the minimum wage by such a degree that at least 2 million Americans were due raises by 2020, The Atlantic reported. Major win.
A ballot measure to lower the minimum wage for employees in South Dakota under the age of 18 who do not receive tips was rejected by more than 70% of voters in 2016, the Associated Press reported. Another win.
The GOP didn’t, however, take the losses silently.
The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is monitoring 87 bills that aim “to change the ballot measure process or block ballot measure implementation in 13 states,” the organization reported. The organization identified Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota as “top states to watch.”
This year, Arizona voters will consider imposing both a “single subject rule” requiring each ballot initiative to address only one topic, and a repeal of the Voter Protection Act, “a 24 year old law which protects ballot measures from being altered by legislators after they are approved by voters,” according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
Here’s what the center reported on Florida and Missouri:
Florida: Following the trend of their 2021 legislative session, Florida legislators have introduced bills intended to dilute direct democracy from a few different angles: (a) by making the signature collection process more onerous and more confusing, (b) by severely limiting the subjects voters can consider at the ballot, and by limiting campaign contributions during the signature gathering process.
Missouri: The legislature has introduced nearly two dozen attacks on the initiative process as of March 1, 2022. These attacks are designed to curtail Missourian’s initiative and referendum rights in a variety of ways, including raising the voter approval threshold, increasing the signature collection requirements, expanding the geographic signature collection requirements, increasing the fees to file signatures, creating new ways signatures can be invalidated, and even making the processes indirect by giving the legislature say over what voters propose. After failing to pass attacks last year, Missouri legislators are even more determined to undermine the people’s tool this year.
Mestel tweeted that legislators are trying to raise the threshold for a measure to pass to 60% in Arizona and 66% in Missouri. “And when initiatives succeed, lawmakers don’t always listen,” he continued. “After FL voters raised the minimum wage, legislators tried to create a ‘sub-minimum’ wage for service workers.”
That bill failed, but a vital takeaway remains: Where there is a Republican will, there will be a suppressive way. The only real, long-term solution is to vote them out of office.