Tag Archives: ballot initiatives

Why I Want to Start a Non-Profit for Direct Democracy

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One of my long-term goals is to start a 501(c)3 nonpartisan organization to educate the public in support of direct democracy (if no one else does it first).

I understand that the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) does an amazing job in supporting the use of the ballot initiative from a progressive standpoint. However, their Defend Direct Democracy campaign page, IMO, doesn’t exactly address how their organization defends the use of direct democracy from legislative and bureaucratic attacks. And they don’t seem to have a resource for model legislation or how to advocate for adding direct democracy to more state laws, including state constitutions.

If there is one thing that more states need – especially states with part-time legislatures, especially Southern states, especially states which lack nonpartisan redistricting – it is direct democracy. But no one is trying to push these states to adopt direct democracy into their state laws, and BISC seems to only play defense for the right to the ballot initiative.

I wouldn’t want this hypothetical organization to duplicate any of BISC’s work, only to do the following:

  • educate the public on the nonpartisan necessity for the ballot initiative system
  • build a political and social culture for ballot initiative systems in states which lack such systems
  • train election administrators on how to implement ballot initiative systems in their election regimes
  • train and support advocates on expert talking points supporting the ballot initiative system

It is sad that the ballot initiative system only was adopted in some states through the Progressive era of the 1890s-1910s and then largely fell off afterward (save for brief victories in Florida and Mississippi). But just like how once-nearly-abandoned election systems like ranked-choice voting have made a comeback through the likes of FairVote advocating to the public, I want to duplicate the success of the ranked-choice voting movement for the ballot initiative system.

So here’s me sending this idea “out to the universe”: a 501(c)3 nonpartisan organization supporting the right to the ballot initiative system in more states.

Ohio’s Direct Democracy Survives and Thrives

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Ohio defeated a proposed amendment meant to make ballot initiatives impossible, despite the state government using every possible trick to help it pass, including placing the question on the ballot for August.

Apparently, the turnout exceeded most primary votes in the last several election cycles since 2016. The result also largely broke down by population density, with Democratic-heavy counties joined by voting No. The result largely bucked the trend of past presidential and statewide elections, with substantial crossover voting from Republicans who opposed the ballot question.

Winners:

  • Both November 7 ballot initiatives:
    • Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative, on the ballot November 7 (passed)
    • Marijuana Legalization Initiative, on the ballot November 7 (passed)
  • At least 3 potential ballot initiatives working for the 2024 ballot:
    • Citizens Redistricting Commission Amendment
    • Minimum Wage Increase Initiative (for $15)
    • Constitutional and Legal Rights Relating to Public Safety, Including Prohibiting Qualified Immunity Initiative
  • former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who is leading the effort for the Citizens Redistricting Commission Amendment and was infamously snubbed by the Ohio Republican-supermajority legislature

Losers:

  • Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R)
  • Governor Mike DeWine (R)
  • Attorney General David Yost (R)
  • The Ohio Republican Legislative Supermajority
  • Ohio Chamber of Commerce
  • Anti-choice reactionaries

Third Time’s the Charm for Citizen Redistricting Initiatives in Ohio

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What will be the difference between 2005, 2012 and 2024 for citizen redistricting in Ohio?

Let’s look at the 2012 proposal.

The Voters First Ohio campaign went to court against the Ohio Ballot Board over the language of the measure. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled for the campaign, but when the Ballot Board met again, the ballot language was doubled in length. 

The opponents of the 2012 measure, including both big business lobbies and the boards of at least two major newspapers, decried the alleged “lack of [electoral] accountability” of a citizen redistricting commission, as well as the mandated funding for the commission’s work. 

Both newspapers instead extolled the idea of requiring a bipartisan supermajority from a politician-majority commission for passage of a map, and the proposal went down in defeat.

This was said before Ohio, in two legislatively-referred amendments in 2015 and 2018, replaced the Ohio Apportionment Board with the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which did no better in 2021-2023 at drawing fairer maps despite requiring bipartisan supermajority approval. Wonder if they changed their tune?

The CNP initiative seems to keep most of the 2012 proposal. Differences:

  • The CNP proposal would involve a bipartisan panel of only retired judges to screen potential candidates for the commission. The 2012 plan would have involved sitting appellate court judges in the selection of commissioners.
  • CNP’s plan bans prison gerrymandering. 

The use of retired judges effectively sidesteps one of the sticking points of the 2012 plan, which drew the opposition of both the Ohio Judicial Conference and the Ohio State Bar Association for this reason. This amendment, certainly, needs as many supporters, or as few opponents, as possible.

There is no telling whether the big business lobbies have changed their tune. The Ohio Farm Bureau Association and Ohio Chamber of Commerce, both of which publicly opposed Issue 2 in 2012, both backed August 2023 Issue 1, which would have seriously hobbled direct democracy in the state. The failure of that amendment may not say too much about the fate of CNP’s initiative, but it does show the deep entrenchment of the political elite in Ohio that such a blatantly anti-democratic proposal as August 2023 Ohio Issue 1 would see the light of day.

But the repeated failures of citizen redistricting proposals at the ballot box, or at least the failures of their campaigns, need to be considered as teaching moments for those who assume that it will win this round in 2024. In addition, the chicanery of oppositional officeholders like the Secretary of State, who changed the ballot summary language of November 2023 Ohio Issue 1 to reflect Christian right-wing beliefs about abortion, should not be ignored (even if his actions failed to stop the measure from victory at the polls). Victory is not certain, and what those past campaigns endured should help this campaign improvise, adapt and overcome in 2024.

Let’s also see if the CNP proposal makes it to the ballot at all. After being approved by the Attorney General (who accepted it after previously rejecting it twice) and Ohio Ballot Board, the campaign recently voluntarily reset the clock after discovering a typo, then rewrote the petition and sent it back to the Attorney General, who approved it a second time. It now awaits the Ohio Ballot Board’s decision before it is finally set to begin collecting signatures.

2022 Georgia Primary Ballot Advisory Questions: A Postscript

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  • Full list of questions
  • All statewide questions on both ballots received a large majority response, with only one question (Republican Question 5) receiving a “No” response.
  • I wrote Democratic Questions 4 and 8. I’m proud. I only wish a few more of my questions were added. Thanks to Scout Smith for lobbying the DPG for these questions and helping me narrow down my shortlist to 7.
  • I consider an advisory question to be controversial if majority response is 80% or less. Few questions on the ballot in the history of advisory questions in Georgia primaries have ever fallen under 80% majority response.
  • I’m getting ready for 2024.

Democratic Question 8

  • Coverage of Democratic Question 8: Marijuana Moment, Ganjapreneur, Cannabis Business Times
  • Democratic Question 8 (which I authored) had the most controversial reception on the Democratic ballot, despite all counties voting in favor.
  • Athens-Clarke’s Democrats had the most lopsided response to Democratic Question 8. Baker County had the worst response.
  • Clarke and Forsyth had extra marijuana legalization questions for some reason.
  • Democratic Question 8 is the most complete survey on support for marijuana legalization carried out so far. However, this only covers the Democratic side of the ballot.
    • In 2018, separate Republican questions for medical marijuana and decriminalized recreational access were asked in Harris, Pierce and Ware, with only medical questions being asked in Gordon, Walker and Whitfield. 
    • In 2020, Henry County Republicans asked a question on recreational legalization. This was the first to receive majority support from Republican voters, albeit much slimmer than on past Democratic ballots.
    • Past Democratic questions on legalization were offered in Cherokee (2014), Whitfield (2014), Glynn (2018), Forsyth (2018 and 2020), and Walton (2020), with a question on medical cannabis being asked in Richmond in 2014 and Catoosa in 2016.

Other Ballot Questions

  • Democratic Question 1, dealing with student loan debt forgiveness, was probably the second most controversial question on the Democratic ballot.
  • Democratic Question 4 shows support among the Democratic base for stronger direct democracy than what we currently have.
  • Republican Question 5, which was written exactly to elicit reactionary conservative disgust/hatred against transgender people, had the most lopsided response on the Republican ballot.
  • All of the other statewide Republican questions were garbage, and I would have wanted the opportunity to vote no on every single one of them on the same ballot as I voted yes to every single Democratic question. One can dream.
  • Many county-level questions dealt with local government and infrastructure questions.
  • Fulton and DeKalb’s Republican ballots both had anti-mask, anti-vaccine questions.
  • Carroll and Forsyth’s Democratic ballots had questions on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in education, while DeKalb’s Republican ballot had a question on CRT.
  • Jackson’s Democratic ballot had an anti-Confederate monument question.
  • Oconee County had the only jointly-shared questions on the primary ballot this cycle, with Republicans going out of their way to spell out in bold “This question was drafted by the Democrat party and is being included on this ballot at the request of the Oconee County Republican Party.” behind both joint questions on their ballot.
    • Rockdale held a joint question in 2012, as did Pickens in 2018.

2022 Ballot Measures to Sign and/or Support

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2022 ballot measures I would canvass for if I could move out of Georgia:

Medicaid Expansion Comes to Oklahoma, Hopefully to Missouri Next Month

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The successful Oklahoma vote on Medicaid expansion, State Question 802, may be a resounding success, but it was overestimated in how wide the margin would be between Yes and No. Pollsters predicted a 60-40 Yes vote, but it barely passed at 50-49. A few points, and how they apply to the Missouri Medicaid expansion vote on August 11:

  • That those 7 counties in which Yes was the majority only sustained half of the total statewide Yes vote. 49% of the Yes vote came from all of the other 70 counties in the state, even the border counties. So that is another reminder that land doesn’t vote, and campaigning to the cities in a state where the urban population at the last census was 66% is not a good idea.
  • That the vote largely reflected income patterns across the state, a bit more so than urban-rural setting. Research is showing that the richest 200 precincts in the state voted in the minority for SQ802, while the poorest 200 precincts voted in the majority for the same, even as both groups of precincts are largely split between urban and rural precincts.
  • That voter suppression played a role in the final vote. Besides the antagonism of Governor Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma Republicans and Americans for Prosperity against the initiative, this primary was impacted by the Oklahoma Legislature passing new requirements for notarizations on absentee ballots, even after the State Supreme Court threw out the requirement as unconstitutional. There’s also the fact that 200k less Oklahomans turned out for this primary than the 2018 primary, when Oklahomans voted 60-40 in favor of medical marijuana.

Also, a crucial minority of Republicans voted for Medicaid expansion, pushing #SQ802 over the top in a state where Trump won 60-30 and Stitt won by more than 10 points. This result shows that the support for these ballot initiatives has swingier, more elastic votes among both party bases than how they vote in elections.

So this brings me to Missouri, which will vote on Medicaid expansion on the August 4 gubernatorial primary ballot. Missouri has a higher urban-to-rural population ratio than Oklahoma, the same as Idaho (which also passed Medicaid expansion 60-40 in 2018), and has had a similar tendency to vote for progressive measures such as nonpartisan redistricting and medical marijuana. But Oklahoma’s razor-thin margin shows that advocates for Medicaid expansion must work for this vote this month. Also, Missouri has the same requirements about absentee voting as does Oklahoma, and the same Republican legislative opposition against Medicaid expansion.

I have family in the St. Louis area, and their health would stand to gain from a Yes vote.

Fair and Equal Michigan Finds a Way to E-Sign Ballot Petitions

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I’ll be watching Fair and Equal Michigan’s electronic signature campaign for putting an LGBT anti-discrimination bill on the November ballot. Numerous other organizations have tried gathering signatures by mail or electronically, but many state governments which allow for petitions to put questions on general election ballots specifically mandate (like in Arizona’s constitution for example) that the circulator must witness voters signing the petition in person, and even what sort of ink to use. Courts in Ohio, Montana and Arizona have all ruled against ballot campaigns asking for electronic signatures for such issues as Redistricting reform, Cannabis decriminalization and voting rights expansion, all within the last month.

The Michigan campaign is doing an end run around this requirement by allowing Michigan voters to:

  1. use two-factor authentication
  2. submit their driver’s license or State ID number
  3. use DocuSign to sign twice, once as a signer and once as a petition circulator
  4. Have their identity checked against voter rolls by the campaign

Furthermore, the campaign cites that this is covered under both Michigan’s Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) as well as Executive Order 2020-41, both of which provide that e-signatures for legal documents shall have legal effect and shall not be denied enforceability. If they pull this off and can get the prerequisite number of signatures before May 27, this may be the first statewide ballot question in US history to ever be put on a general election ballot using electronic signatures. This could open a new chapter in direct democracy in the United States.