Direct Democracy
A look at direct democracy reforms proposed in 2024
What is Direct Democracy?
This category includes laws governing the initiative process, the legislative vehicle by which ordinary citizens can bypass legislators to put proposed laws on the ballot. It typically consists of a qualification process, where proposed legislation is presented to voters, and those who support the proposal can sign a petition to put the legislation on the ballot. Once a certain threshold of valid signatures is reached, all voters get to weigh in on Election Day. South Dakota was the first state to adopt it in the late 19th century. Today, 26 states have a statewide initiative process
Legislative attacks on the ballot initiative process have taken on a new urgency, following an increase in citizen-initiated ballot measures to protect abortion access after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision in 2022
Why are we tracking it?
The initiative process plays an important role in giving voters a direct role in lawmaking, and is one of the main vehicles election reformers use to pass structural reforms that legislators won’t. In this report, we track laws that propose substantial changes to the initiative process—from attempts to make the process of qualifying an initiative harder, to supermajority requirements for passage of initiatives, to amendments that improve or ease the process. We do not include smaller changes to components of the process, such as qualifications for signature gatherers or changes to the petition form. We realize these changes can present substantial new hurdles, but those are beyond the scope of this project.
Categories and definitions:
- New geographic distribution requirement: A geographic distribution requirement refers to the number of jurisdictions (usually counties or congressional districts) that petitions must be circulated in and signatures must be gathered from. A law with this label creates a new or higher geographic distribution requirement.
- Process modification: This label is an umbrella term referring to any law that substantially modifies the process for qualifying an initiative.
- New initiative and referendum (I&R) process: A law that creates or re-establishes the citizen’s initiative or referendum process and supporting laws.
- Supermajority requirement: Any law that requires a ballot question to pass with more than 50%+1 support at the polls.
Analysis
The ballot initiative process is a vital and powerful tool that voters can employ to directly propose legislation, one of the most direct forms of democracy enjoyed by 26 states. This power is something that’s frequently undercut by lawmakers by any means available, including the legislative process. Legislative attacks on the ballot initiative process have taken on a new urgency, following an increase in citizen-initiated ballot measures to protect abortion access after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision in 2022. We tracked proposals and trends targeting this process, to either expand or restrict it.
Attacks on the process. A deeper look at a few key proposals shows how this strategy has developed over time. In Missouri, lawmakers introduced more than 20 bills to add hurdles or limit the process, according to BISC. These attacks ranged from supermajority requirements for constitutional amendments to bans specifically on ballot initiatives about abortion access (SJR 62). The proposal that the GOP majority rallied behind (SJR 74) would have required a concurrent majority, which is a majority of the statewide vote and a majority of either congressional districts, state Senate districts, or state House districts. However, the bill failed on the last day of the session. Other attempts to complicate the process included four bills in Arizona and Oklahoma to increase geographic distribution requirements, and bills from Michigan, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah addressing signature-gatherer qualifications. There were other proposals in Arizona, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. to add new hurdles to the process, from new legal challenge options to additional signature-matching for petition signers to prohibitions on initiatives that require appropriations.
New opportunities for legal challenges. Even though the initiative process saw many proposed attacks during the 2024 legislative session, the only major proposals that passed related to legal challenge options for citizen-initiated measures. Arizona’s SCR 1041 adds a new legal challenge option for ballot measures, where anyone may bring suit against a proposed initiative challenging its constitutionality at any time, even after signatures have been turned in, as long as it is filed more than 100 days before Election Day. Allowing for legal challenges at this late stage in the qualification process creates new financial risks for initiative backers that could have a chilling effect on initiatives in the future.
The other bill to pass in this category this session was Oklahoma’s HB 1105, which extends the legal challenge window from 10 to 90 days, along with new fees and administrative hurdles, such as requiring criminal background checks for signature gatherers. These changes may seem small compared to other proposals in this category, but each additional hoop to jump through creates new opportunities for state officials to delay or derail a petition effort. This could be a popular model to undermine the initiative process forward.
Legislation to adopt an initiative process. As often as we see attacks on the initiative process, we also often see new proposals to bring the initiative process to more states. This year, eight states (New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Wyoming, Mississippi, Georgia, Hawaii, and New Jersey) introduced legislation to create an initiative and referendum process. While none of the proposals passed or even passed one house, it’s worth noting that we saw proposals in red states, blue states, and states with divided government. This category is even more important to watch following the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, now that the battle for reproductive rights is happening on ballots across the country. Since reproductive rights measures often succeed when put before voters, we could see more efforts by state legislatures to obfuscate the initiative process.