(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Downballot: The Republican war on ballot initiatives, with Stephen Wolf (transcript) [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-09 This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections. David Nir: And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star rating and review. David Beard: Now we've got a topic we're going to go real deep on today, right? David Nir: We are welcoming back Daily Kos Elections' writer Stephen Wolf to discuss the GOP's war on ballot measures. Republicans across the country are making it harder for progressives to change their state's policies through the ballot initiative process, and Stephen is going to walk us all through that. We are going to head straight into our discussion with him. So we will be right back after this quick break. Joining us once again on today's show is Daily Kos Elections' writer Stephen Wolf. Stephen, thanks so much for coming back. Stephen Wolf: Thanks for having me. David Nir: So the topic that we want to address with you today is what I'm going to call the GOP's war on ballot initiatives, specifically Republicans trying to make it harder for generally progressive activists to put measures on the ballot pursuing progressive policies that voters can then vote on. But before we dive into all of that, I think it would make sense for us to maybe lay a little groundwork on how the initiative process works, generally. Some of our listeners, especially folks in states like California or Michigan, are going to be very familiar with the process. But I'm from New York and we don't have ballot initiatives here, and we very rarely have the opportunity to vote on things on the ballot. So there are definitely going to be folks who are less familiar with the whole process. So I would love it if you could start just by giving us an overview of the initiative process nationwide. Stephen Wolf: Right. So in about half the states, ballot initiatives lets citizens directly pass new laws, or constitutional amendments, or both. And proponents will have to gather voter signatures, and if a sufficient number are valid, they go on the ballot before voters as a ballot question. And veto referendums are very similar, except they are for blocking laws that have just been passed by lawmakers. And so those can both be initiated by citizens. But in every state, aside from Delaware, there is a ballot referendum process whereby legislators can put constitutional amendments on the ballot. And that's a different process where voters are not the ones initiating. And initiatives and referendum laws largely came about during the progressive era between 1900 and 1920, and almost every state in the West and the Plains has some sort of initiative process, but only a handful in each of the Midwest, Northeast, and South allow ballot initiatives. The process for putting an initiative on the ballot varies widely between states, and most states require just a simple majority for passage, but a handful of states require 55% or 60% voter approval for initiatives. David Nir: So you said that the requirements to get on the ballot vary a lot state by state, but we are talking even in the smaller states, a very large proportion of voter signatures, tens if not hundreds of thousands. And these are typically expensive campaigns to run because this takes a lot of effort to get this many signatures to put something on the ballot. Stephen Wolf: Yeah, that's right. And most states tend to tie their signature requirements to the proportion of votes equal to the last governor election or presidential election. Signatures cannot be equal to hundreds of thousands of voters or even a million voters or more in a big state like Florida. David Beard: And you mentioned that a lot of these came about in the progressive era between 1900 and 1920, and the idea behind them was sort of an expansion of democracy. The idea that allowing voters and the people to actually pass laws was a... I don't know if more democratic way, but a democratic way to let people have a voice beyond just state legislatures, right? Stephen Wolf: Yeah, that's right. This is the same era where the U.S. Constitution was amended to require direct collection of senators. And the idea behind both of these sorts of changes was that party bosses were in control of state governments and initiatives or direct elections will allow voters to take back democratic power from these corrupt institutions. David Nir: And today, instead of party bosses blocking progress, what we have in so many states are Republican legislatures refusing to advance all manner of bills that would be really popular with the public. We know that they would be including things like gun safety laws or minimum wage expansions. And the initiative process, and I think this is getting to the heart of what we want to discuss today, has been very effectively used by folks on the left, progressives, democrats, liberals, to get measures passed that Republican legislatures are otherwise steadfast against. Stephen Wolf: That's right. There are broadly two sets of different policies that progressives have been really active at trying to pass the ballot box. And one of those is just your progressive bills like Medicaid expansion, income taxes on the wealthy, raising the minimum wage, gun safety laws, abortion access, or public education funding. And the other category is democracy reforms, things like voting rights expansions, redistricting reform, or also alternative electoral systems. And in many instances where these sorts of policies have passed to the ballot box, Republican legislatures have responded by trying to make future ballot initiatives much more difficult. David Beard: And that's the core of what we wanted to talk about today has been this Republican response in recent years to progressives turning to this initiative process to pass laws that they don't like. And as we've seen at this level and in so many different cases, when things start happening that Republicans don't like, they don't go to the idea of we need to convince the American people to change their minds or to find a better way to present their ideas. What they want to do is find a way to stop whatever process progressives are using from being used. And that's what we've seen in this initiative process area. So give us a sense broadly of how Republicans are doing this in the states before we go into a more state by state look. Stephen Wolf: Right. So one of the ways they do this is by making it more burdensome to collect voter signatures. And some of the ways they do that is they'll ban payment on a per signature basis, which requires either paying on an hourly basis or relying on volunteers to gather signatures. Another way is just to increase the total number of signatures required statewide. And then one of the most deviously clever ways they've gone about this is imposing a signature requirement in some or all of the counties or legislative districts in the state. And this has a very disproportionate burden on progressive campaigns and not conservative ones because in your average state, the majority of counties are very small, they're very white, and they're very conservative as a result. And also in many of these state legislatures, the districts are very heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Another way that initiative restrictions go about trying to make the process more difficult is banning out-of-state donors or imposing limits on out-of-state signature gatherers. And both of these sorts of restrictions have faced legal challenges and often been struck down for violating the First Amendment. But if republicans can't prevent these measures from making it onto the ballot, one thing they tried to require is a super majority of voters support to pass them into law. And oftentimes it'll be much harder for progressives to, say, get 60% of the vote instead of a simple majority for a contentious policy. But if all of that fails, sometimes Republican legislatures simply refuse to enforce the law, and they can do this by defunding them, maybe outright repealing them or stacking the courts to strike them down. David Nir: Stephen, I want to drill down into one of the many devious ways. You mentioned that Republicans make it harder for progressives without making it harder for conservatives in the same way to get measures on the ballot. And that is the geographic distribution requirements. You talked about needing a certain number of signatures per county or per legislative district. So if I'm understanding you right, in big cities, it's very easy to find lots of potential signers of petitions. You're particularly going to find larger concentrations of progressive left-leaning voters who are willing to sign your measures. And in the big cities, you can also find a lot of Republican voters simply because you just have denser populations in these cities. So even in a city like Los Angeles, you're still going to find plenty of Republicans if you know where to look. Whereas in the rural areas, you are going to have a hell of a hard time finding progressive voters. But most of the people you encounter are going to probably be conservative leaning. Stephen Wolf: Yeah, that's right. And one of the states where Republicans are trying to pass just one of these restrictions just this year is in Arizona where the state senate has passed a constitutional amendment that would require voter signatures equal to about 15% of registered voters in every legislative district. And why that might sound fairly reasonable to the uninformed, 15% of registered voters in the most conservative district where Joe Biden took just 24% of the vote, that equals almost the entirety of his actual vote total. So it's going to be very difficult for a polarizing progressive issue to get enough signatures in that sort of district. But on the flip side, there's another district in the northeastern part of the state that's very rural and heavily Native American. And although it's a very Democratic district, these Democratic voters are very spread out. They're often very inaccessible to things like public transportation. And so it's going to be very difficult for canvassers to reach these sorts of people, even if they wanted to sign the petition that they're circulating. David Beard: Now, you just talked about Arizona. I want to talk about another piece of legislation that's potentially moving that I find to be truly wild, which is in Mississippi, where the Supreme Court already struck down the whole initiative process in 2021, seemingly largely to stop some progressive legislation from getting on the ballot in the first place. And now the GOP legislatures are reviving it, but they're just going to revive it for certain things. They want to completely stop voters from being able to vote on issues that they don't like. Right? Stephen Wolf: Right. So for about two decades until 2021, Mississippi allowed voters to place ballot initiatives on the ballot to amend their state constitution. And while these weren't used very frequently, they had been potent tools for attempting things like medical marijuana or upcoming efforts to expand Medicaid or even potentially expand voting rights. But two years ago, the state Supreme Court said, "Oh, because the state lost its fifth congressional district two decades ago, and the amendment process specifically cites five districts for requiring voter signatures, lo and behold, we have to strike down the entire process." And what was so absurd about this was that the state still had five districts under state law, and it was only because federal court had redrawn the maps for the last two decades that it no longer had five districts. But the new process they are considering enacting, yes, it would let voters place initiatives on the ballot again, but no, they couldn't amend the state constitution. And if that's not enough, they would be prohibited from addressing certain topics like abortion and effectively prohibited on certain topics like ending gerrymandering, which would require a constitutional amendment. David Nir: I'd like to dig into that last thing you said a little bit more, that with this neutered process that Republicans are proposing to restore in Mississippi, that citizens would only be allowed to initiate statutes as opposed to constitutional amendments, and that would make it essentially impossible to end gerrymandering because you really need a constitutional amendment in order to be able to do that. Can you talk about why and the strengths of one versus the other: statute versus an amendment? Stephen Wolf: Yes. So in most states with the ballot initiative process, voters can directly amend the state constitution. And then in some of the states where voters can only create statutes, there are still rules that prevent the legislature from just repealing whatever they don't like, especially if legislatures don't have broad support to repeal these laws. But if it's just a regular statute and there's no prohibition on legislators repealing it, there's nothing that would prevent a legislature from saying, "Oh, great independent commission you just passed here. We don't like that. We're going to overturn it." And that's not just a theoretical matter, that actually happened in Utah in recent years. Where in 2018, voters passed a statute ballot initiative creating a redistricting commission. And because it wasn't a constitutional amendment, the legislature was just able to go in and alter the statute and then ignore it when they passed their new gerrymander after the 2020 census. David Beard: And that change essentially lost Democrats a seat. Correct? Because an independently drawn map would've almost certainly had a Democratic leaning district around Salt Lake City, right? Stephen Wolf: Yeah. That's right. David Beard: So I want to turn to a couple of states in the Midwest — I guess debatably in Missouri's case — that are doing some of the things that you talked about in examples, Missouri and Ohio. Both of which are looking to increase to a 60% voter super-majority, and are putting those geographic restrictions that we've talked about to make it really hard to get these amendments on the ballot. And you even had a top sponsor admit to this, right? In Ohio? Stephen Wolf: Yes. So in Ohio, one of the big developments that's happening this year is activists are trying to put an abortion rights ballot measure on the ballot this year. And a separate set of activists are trying to put an independent redistricting commission on the ballot next year. And last year when this effort to restrict the initiative process first surfaced, the top Republican sponsor had privately told his colleagues, that this was specifically designed to thwart abortion rights and the effort to end Republican gerrymandering. Whereas publicly, they're claiming all these sorts of nonpartisan reasons about, oh, out-of-state influence or voters need to be certain what they're voting on. But this really gets to the heart of what the issue is here. And it's not that Republicans have some high-minded opposition to direct democracy; it's they're opposed to these specific sorts of policies that are either threatening their hold on power or are enacting progressive policies directly. David Nir: So let's talk a little bit more about that threshold, which as you said earlier in most states is 50%, you need a majority of voters to approve a ballot measure including a change to the state constitution. And in so many of these states, like the ones we were just discussing, Missouri, and Ohio — also Arizona and Florida as well — they're talking about increasing that to 60% or even higher. In fact, in Florida, they want to move it to, I believe two-thirds, which would be the nation's highest threshold. I could see an argument to say, "Well, if you are going to amend the state constitution, we really should have a very high threshold for that." What is the argument for, why no, actually, a majority ought to be sufficient? Stephen Wolf: Well, one of the arguments is that it's already pretty difficult for proponents to put measures on the ballot. And California is really kind of an exception, where every year it seems like they're voting on 10 different policies. In a state like Ohio, they have had very few ballot measures actually appear on the ballot, and fewer still actually have passed in recent decades. And another argument of course is that many of these restrictions don't apply to ballot measures referred by legislators. Legislators could still pass an amendment, and if only a simple majority of voters approve it, it would become law. So it's really not about voters being educated and reaching consensus on an issue. It's just we don't like competition for power, so we're going to restrict the public from directly initiating laws. David Beard: One trick that we've often seen with these initiatives is the placement of when they take place. And we see saw this in Kansas in 2022, where they moved the abortion vote to the primary because they were hoping that there would be more Republican turnout and a bunch of highly competitive Republican primary races over democratic primaries that obviously don't get as much play in Kansas. And that differential and turnout would give them a boost. And then in Oklahoma, the Republican governor picked a very off year, low turnout time to schedule this marijuana legalization vote, which we just saw go down to a pretty bad defeat. So talk about how the ability to select the date can also affect how Republicans are manipulating this process. Stephen Wolf: So in many states, ballot initiatives can only take place in November, and in some of those states only in even-numbered years when they coincide with state and federal races. And the logic behind this is that when there are high-profile federal or state races on the ballot, voter turnout tends to be much higher sometimes by a factor of multiple times over than if it were on a separate date in the spring or in odd numbered year. But some of these other states like Oklahoma, give the state government a wide leeway over setting when the vote takes place. And so what Oklahoma's governor did was he didn't just pick an odd-numbered year; he picked a completely separate date where nothing else was on the ballot, even though there were other state elections happening the month or two before or after this vote took place on Tuesday. And so what happened, of course, was turnout was pretty low. And oftentimes when you have a downballot election taking place on a date where federal or state races are not also taking place, turnout tends not to be low, but disproportionately old, disproportionately white, disproportionately higher income. And as a result, disproportionately conservative, which is the entire point that Republicans are trying to select their own voters here. And in fact, in Oklahoma, there are several bills under consideration right now, one of which would require ballot initiative votes to only take place in odd-numbered years knowing that turnout would be at its lowest. David Nir: So what this all comes down to then is Republicans simply trying to clamp down on voters expressing their voices and ensuring that the only policies that become law are those that make it through Republican legislatures themselves, which are typically very gerrymandered. Stephen Wolf: Exactly. And these moves almost always follow the same playbook. First, Republicans gain total state power, and then try to permanently cement it through gerrymandering and voting restrictions. Second, voters respond by using the ballot initiative process to pass progressive laws or structural reforms to democracy to strengthen voting rights and ensure fair districts. Third, when that happens, Republicans respond with initiative restrictions, specifically citing voter-backed reforms that have recently passed, and not just some abstract rejection of direct democracy. And one telling outcome of these Republican restrictions on initiatives is they are often are very targeted towards progressive measures and not conservative ones, so leaving a pathway open for voters to use initiatives to either restrict abortion rights or expanding access to guns. David Beard: And so progressive response is going to be varied state by state here, obviously, because all of this is being done at the state level; you have to follow the individual state's constitutions or processes that they have. And in some cases that might be in the courts. In some places there may be ways to tackle this electorally, and some ways there may not be a way. So how would you advise if you were living in one of these red states, how can you be helpful in either getting these on the ballot or pushing progressive policies forward despite these Republican blockades? Stephen Wolf: Right. So Republicans often can impose more burdensome signature requirements just via statute like banning payment per signature. So in that case, progressives usually need just more funding and volunteer organization to kind of overcome these burdens and live with the system Republicans have put in place. But requiring a super-majority of voter approval or requiring a geographic distribution of signatures that typically requires changing state constitutions. And in those cases, that gives voters a chance to block them. And that just happened last year in Arkansas and South Dakota, where voters rejected Republican-backed efforts to require 60% super majorities. But finally, there is one third option, where progressives have had success challenging statutory restrictions in court, but that takes time and money, and it's also less likely to succeed in states where conservatives already dominate the judiciary. David Nir: So that's really interesting to me that some of these efforts to make ballot measures harder to pass themselves, have to go on the ballot and have to be approved by voters. So which are the states this year or next that we can likely expect to see Republican measures on the ballot that voters will have the chance to reject? Stephen Wolf: Yeah, those are most likely to be on the ballot before voters in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, or Oklahoma. David Nir: Well, voters in each of those states, if you see a measure come before you on the ballot trying to make future ballot measures harder, you know exactly what to do. Stephen Wolf, it has been fantastic having you on the show once again, but before we let you go, you have a fantastic Twitter account where you're covering issues just like this, voting rights, gerrymandering. Where can people find you? Stephen Wolf: They can find me at @PoliticsWolf. David Nir: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Stephen. Stephen Wolf: Thanks for having me. David Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Stephen Wolf for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/9/2157115/-The-Downballot-The-Republican-war-on-ballot-initiatives-with-Stephen-Wolf-transcript Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/