Dave Farber
2018-10-10 02:10:31 UTC
Subject: Direct Democracy â ballot initiatives â are growing in popularity in the US
Date: October 10, 2018 9:55:42 JST
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/citizen-ballot-initiatives-2018-elections/558098/
American Voters Are Turning to Direct Democracy
In many states, the most important policy changes this year wonât come from legislation, but from ballot initiatives.
VANN R. NEWKIRK II APR 18, 2018
American democracy is in troubleâand thatâs expert opinion.
According to The Economistâs annual Democracy Index report, the United States in 2017 qualified as a âflawed democracyâ for the second year running, which indicates citizensâ deepening distrust of the countryâs electoral system and its politicians, among other issues. Other recent analyses have sounded alarm bells, too. Congressional gridlock is worsening. Partisan polarization is increasing. The âbig sortââthe geographic self-segregation of like-minded Americansâhas distorted representation. So has rampant gerrymandering. As a result of both kinds of distortion, many politicians across the country do not necessarily speak with the voice of their constituents, at both the federal and state levels.
But faced with these new problems, many voters are turning to old solutions. Through citizen-led ballot measures, voters in many states can use the power of direct democracy to bypass state legislatures and create new laws. These measures have been instrumental in recent years in pushing forward major legislation on health care, election reform, drugs, and other policy areas that have hit an impasse in statehouses. In 2018, these initiativesâand efforts by legislatures to stop or negotiate themâwill be critical factors in determining who really controls government, and just exactly how it works.
2016 provides a useful baseline for understanding the relationship between ballot initiatives and the state of democracy. âOverall, the total number of statewide ballot measures, including those put on the ballot by state legislatures, has been declining pretty consistently over the last decade and a half,â Josh Altic, the director of the ballot-initiatives project at Ballotpedia, an online political encyclopedia, said. âThe number of citizen initiatives has been decreasing since 2006 along with them. But in 2016, we kind of had this turnaround, and all of a sudden there was an undeniable increase in the interest and the number of those initiatives.â
That year, the number of citizen initiatives that made state ballots (71) was more than double the total amount from 2014. Thatâs despite 2016 following the long-term trend of shrinking ballot measures overallâwhich has been driven mostly by a precipitous decline in the number of constitutional amendments proposed by legislatures. The 71 initiatives represent a high-water mark in elections over the past decadeâmeaning that even as state legislatures steadily put fewer and fewer constitutional amendments and state statutes up for a vote, direct democracy (in some ways) still had a banner year in 2016.
One reason for that relative success is procedural. Many statesâ minimum-signature requirements for petitions are based on a percentage of the number of overall votes in the last election. That means that lower voter turnout in one election makes it easier to get petitions approved in the next election. 2016 was ripe for citizen reforms, in part, because in 2014, overall turnout across the country was the lowest in seven decades.
But there could be other factors at work here, too. Perhaps in connection to the previous electionâs record-low turnout, voters did not trust their elected officials to get the job done, and thus turned to direct democracy. âPeople were kind of fed up with either gridlock or opposition in state legislatures,â Altic explained. âYou also have the narrative of the swing towards Republican control over state legislatures since 2010. Thereâs obviously been a big shift in that direction, so you see a lot of progressive citizen initiatives. Thatâs how you get these things done if you donât have the seats in the legislature.â
The kinds of ballot initiatives that were certified in 2016âespecially those that eventually passed that Novemberâprovide a snapshot of which policies were animating American political discourse at the time. They also show where a bipartisan consensus among voters on a specific policy wasnât matched by members of the legislature. Marijuana decriminalization and legalization initiatives saw major nationwide success, reflecting ongoing shifts among Republican voters toward support for legalization. Several states also voted to increase the minimum wage, and statewide health-care and gun-control measures also passed.
The broad success of citizen initiatives two years ago did not, however, change state or federal gridlock, and many votersâ faith in democracy has only frayed since Donald Trump became president: Nearly 40 percent of voters in a March SurveyMonkey poll indicated theyâve given up on democracy. So far, that disillusionment hasnât translated to more ballot initiatives in 2018. âWeâre starting out with a much lower than average number at this point,â Altic said. While many more measures will be certified between now and November, through April 10 Ballotpedia identified only 68 nationwide, versus an expected 97. Of those certified measures, 15 were citizen-initiated.
But this decrease doesnât necessarily mean that the energy for pushing citizen initiatives has died down. To the contrary, the lagging pace may indicate just how powerful these measures have become in modern American politics. In the last two years, 11 states have rendered 2016âs measures mostly symbolic, since legislators were allowed by law to amend or delay passed initiatives. Republican-led legislatures in other places are looking to pass laws to emulate those 11 states, and that could mean there will be fewer initiatives this year and in future elections.
âThe ballot-measure process is under attack,â Justine Sarver, the executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said. âThere were many successful measures in 2016, and weâre seeing many conservative governors saying, âIâm not going to implement that.ââ One recent example: In response to successful Medicaid-expansion and cannabis-legalization referenda in Maine, Republican Governor Paul LePage has led the charge to blunt the effectiveness of the tool itself. âReferendum is pure democracy and it has not worked for 15,000 years,â he said in his final State of the State address in February.
LePageâs campaign echoes those of many conservative leaders across the country. Maine Republicans have proposed a new ballot-initiative scheme that would require petitions to receive not only a certain number of signatures overall, but also a specific number in each congressional districtâthus forcing petitioners to expend more money and energy in districts where they might find less support. South Dakota is considering a similar plan. Arizonaâs legislature has passed a series of laws over the past four years sharply curtailing citizen initiatives, and in 2017, Michigan passed a law tightening the time window for gathering names. Although conservatives have used referenda and amendments effectively as a policymaking tool in the pastâthe most significant being the Proposition 8 amendment that banned same-sex marriage in California in 2008âRepublican leaders have lately characterized the initiatives as progressive weapons aimed at subverting democracy.
For progressives like Sarver, citizen initiatives do, in a way, allow them a chance to even the odds against Republican entrenchment. âI would say we are seeing an increase in the number of proactive, progressive initiatives in this decade,â Sarver said, âwhether thatâs around health, criminal justice, redistricting, and the economy, or [reforms] relevant to democracy.â
Still, among all of the causes Alticâs and Sarverâs groups are monitoring, the most prominent initiatives seem to be those with strong bipartisan support nationallyâjust not necessarily in state legislatures.
Facing the still-extant possibility of an Obamacare repeal by Trump and the national GOPâand just months after the success of the Medicaid-expansion referendum in Maineâvoters in red states like Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska are pushing citizen initiatives to expand Medicaid themselves. Utah in particular has had a powerful pro-citizen-initiative movement over the past few years, with additional petitions for election reforms, school-budget increases, and marijuana legalization. In some cases in Utah, these petitions have garnered so much support that theyâve forced the state legislature to preemptively pass compromise laws that adopt most of the initiativesâ language. And across the country, in response to the gerrymandering thatâs fueled pro-referendum energy in the first place, several petitions to change the way state and congressional redistricting work are picking up signatures.
One such campaign, in Michigan, highlights this nationwide enthusiasm. The Voters Not Politicians campaign to create an independent, citizen-led redistricting commission used 4,000 volunteers to gather over 425,000 signatures in 110 days from all 83 counties. While it now looks likely to win certification for the November ballot, it had humble beginnings. âOur initiative actually started from a Facebook post,â Katie Fahey, the groupâs president, said. âI was not expecting us to end up here. I thought maybe some friends and family would hop in, and we would maybe join with a group to do something.â
But Faheyâs post ballooned in popularity, thanks to what she identifies as an energy that was âhuge and prevalent across the state,â and across partisan and racial lines. âWhen you talked to people, they were just sick of the status quo,â Fahey said. âThey donât trust politicians. They donât trust the political parties to actually have their best interests. In Michigan, we had the Flint water crisis, where an entire city gets poisoned by lead.â
Fahey has observed a blend of âdrain-the-swamp-styleâ anti-establishment sentiment among other citizen-initiative advocates sheâs talked to in Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. Taken together, their action at the local level could prove to be the story of the 2018 elections. In Faheyâs words: âPeople are just tired of waiting, and so they were ready to go and step up and get it done themselves.â
VANN R. NEWKIRK II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.
Kimi Wei
facebook.com/thekimiwei
862-203-8814
-------------------------------------------Date: October 10, 2018 9:55:42 JST
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/citizen-ballot-initiatives-2018-elections/558098/
American Voters Are Turning to Direct Democracy
In many states, the most important policy changes this year wonât come from legislation, but from ballot initiatives.
VANN R. NEWKIRK II APR 18, 2018
American democracy is in troubleâand thatâs expert opinion.
According to The Economistâs annual Democracy Index report, the United States in 2017 qualified as a âflawed democracyâ for the second year running, which indicates citizensâ deepening distrust of the countryâs electoral system and its politicians, among other issues. Other recent analyses have sounded alarm bells, too. Congressional gridlock is worsening. Partisan polarization is increasing. The âbig sortââthe geographic self-segregation of like-minded Americansâhas distorted representation. So has rampant gerrymandering. As a result of both kinds of distortion, many politicians across the country do not necessarily speak with the voice of their constituents, at both the federal and state levels.
But faced with these new problems, many voters are turning to old solutions. Through citizen-led ballot measures, voters in many states can use the power of direct democracy to bypass state legislatures and create new laws. These measures have been instrumental in recent years in pushing forward major legislation on health care, election reform, drugs, and other policy areas that have hit an impasse in statehouses. In 2018, these initiativesâand efforts by legislatures to stop or negotiate themâwill be critical factors in determining who really controls government, and just exactly how it works.
2016 provides a useful baseline for understanding the relationship between ballot initiatives and the state of democracy. âOverall, the total number of statewide ballot measures, including those put on the ballot by state legislatures, has been declining pretty consistently over the last decade and a half,â Josh Altic, the director of the ballot-initiatives project at Ballotpedia, an online political encyclopedia, said. âThe number of citizen initiatives has been decreasing since 2006 along with them. But in 2016, we kind of had this turnaround, and all of a sudden there was an undeniable increase in the interest and the number of those initiatives.â
That year, the number of citizen initiatives that made state ballots (71) was more than double the total amount from 2014. Thatâs despite 2016 following the long-term trend of shrinking ballot measures overallâwhich has been driven mostly by a precipitous decline in the number of constitutional amendments proposed by legislatures. The 71 initiatives represent a high-water mark in elections over the past decadeâmeaning that even as state legislatures steadily put fewer and fewer constitutional amendments and state statutes up for a vote, direct democracy (in some ways) still had a banner year in 2016.
One reason for that relative success is procedural. Many statesâ minimum-signature requirements for petitions are based on a percentage of the number of overall votes in the last election. That means that lower voter turnout in one election makes it easier to get petitions approved in the next election. 2016 was ripe for citizen reforms, in part, because in 2014, overall turnout across the country was the lowest in seven decades.
But there could be other factors at work here, too. Perhaps in connection to the previous electionâs record-low turnout, voters did not trust their elected officials to get the job done, and thus turned to direct democracy. âPeople were kind of fed up with either gridlock or opposition in state legislatures,â Altic explained. âYou also have the narrative of the swing towards Republican control over state legislatures since 2010. Thereâs obviously been a big shift in that direction, so you see a lot of progressive citizen initiatives. Thatâs how you get these things done if you donât have the seats in the legislature.â
The kinds of ballot initiatives that were certified in 2016âespecially those that eventually passed that Novemberâprovide a snapshot of which policies were animating American political discourse at the time. They also show where a bipartisan consensus among voters on a specific policy wasnât matched by members of the legislature. Marijuana decriminalization and legalization initiatives saw major nationwide success, reflecting ongoing shifts among Republican voters toward support for legalization. Several states also voted to increase the minimum wage, and statewide health-care and gun-control measures also passed.
The broad success of citizen initiatives two years ago did not, however, change state or federal gridlock, and many votersâ faith in democracy has only frayed since Donald Trump became president: Nearly 40 percent of voters in a March SurveyMonkey poll indicated theyâve given up on democracy. So far, that disillusionment hasnât translated to more ballot initiatives in 2018. âWeâre starting out with a much lower than average number at this point,â Altic said. While many more measures will be certified between now and November, through April 10 Ballotpedia identified only 68 nationwide, versus an expected 97. Of those certified measures, 15 were citizen-initiated.
But this decrease doesnât necessarily mean that the energy for pushing citizen initiatives has died down. To the contrary, the lagging pace may indicate just how powerful these measures have become in modern American politics. In the last two years, 11 states have rendered 2016âs measures mostly symbolic, since legislators were allowed by law to amend or delay passed initiatives. Republican-led legislatures in other places are looking to pass laws to emulate those 11 states, and that could mean there will be fewer initiatives this year and in future elections.
âThe ballot-measure process is under attack,â Justine Sarver, the executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said. âThere were many successful measures in 2016, and weâre seeing many conservative governors saying, âIâm not going to implement that.ââ One recent example: In response to successful Medicaid-expansion and cannabis-legalization referenda in Maine, Republican Governor Paul LePage has led the charge to blunt the effectiveness of the tool itself. âReferendum is pure democracy and it has not worked for 15,000 years,â he said in his final State of the State address in February.
LePageâs campaign echoes those of many conservative leaders across the country. Maine Republicans have proposed a new ballot-initiative scheme that would require petitions to receive not only a certain number of signatures overall, but also a specific number in each congressional districtâthus forcing petitioners to expend more money and energy in districts where they might find less support. South Dakota is considering a similar plan. Arizonaâs legislature has passed a series of laws over the past four years sharply curtailing citizen initiatives, and in 2017, Michigan passed a law tightening the time window for gathering names. Although conservatives have used referenda and amendments effectively as a policymaking tool in the pastâthe most significant being the Proposition 8 amendment that banned same-sex marriage in California in 2008âRepublican leaders have lately characterized the initiatives as progressive weapons aimed at subverting democracy.
For progressives like Sarver, citizen initiatives do, in a way, allow them a chance to even the odds against Republican entrenchment. âI would say we are seeing an increase in the number of proactive, progressive initiatives in this decade,â Sarver said, âwhether thatâs around health, criminal justice, redistricting, and the economy, or [reforms] relevant to democracy.â
Still, among all of the causes Alticâs and Sarverâs groups are monitoring, the most prominent initiatives seem to be those with strong bipartisan support nationallyâjust not necessarily in state legislatures.
Facing the still-extant possibility of an Obamacare repeal by Trump and the national GOPâand just months after the success of the Medicaid-expansion referendum in Maineâvoters in red states like Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska are pushing citizen initiatives to expand Medicaid themselves. Utah in particular has had a powerful pro-citizen-initiative movement over the past few years, with additional petitions for election reforms, school-budget increases, and marijuana legalization. In some cases in Utah, these petitions have garnered so much support that theyâve forced the state legislature to preemptively pass compromise laws that adopt most of the initiativesâ language. And across the country, in response to the gerrymandering thatâs fueled pro-referendum energy in the first place, several petitions to change the way state and congressional redistricting work are picking up signatures.
One such campaign, in Michigan, highlights this nationwide enthusiasm. The Voters Not Politicians campaign to create an independent, citizen-led redistricting commission used 4,000 volunteers to gather over 425,000 signatures in 110 days from all 83 counties. While it now looks likely to win certification for the November ballot, it had humble beginnings. âOur initiative actually started from a Facebook post,â Katie Fahey, the groupâs president, said. âI was not expecting us to end up here. I thought maybe some friends and family would hop in, and we would maybe join with a group to do something.â
But Faheyâs post ballooned in popularity, thanks to what she identifies as an energy that was âhuge and prevalent across the state,â and across partisan and racial lines. âWhen you talked to people, they were just sick of the status quo,â Fahey said. âThey donât trust politicians. They donât trust the political parties to actually have their best interests. In Michigan, we had the Flint water crisis, where an entire city gets poisoned by lead.â
Fahey has observed a blend of âdrain-the-swamp-styleâ anti-establishment sentiment among other citizen-initiative advocates sheâs talked to in Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. Taken together, their action at the local level could prove to be the story of the 2018 elections. In Faheyâs words: âPeople are just tired of waiting, and so they were ready to go and step up and get it done themselves.â
VANN R. NEWKIRK II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.
Kimi Wei
facebook.com/thekimiwei
862-203-8814
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