Direct Democracy – ballot initiatives – are growing in popularity in the US

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Kimi Wei <kimiwei88 () gmail com>
> Subject: Direct Democracy – ballot initiatives – are growing in popularity in the US
> Date: October 10, 2018 9:55:42 JST
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
>
> 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 won’t come from legislation, but from ballot initiatives.
>
> VANN R. NEWKIRK II  APR 18, 2018
>
> American democracy is in trouble—and that’s expert opinion.
>
> According to The Economist’s annual Democracy Index report, the United States in 2017 qualified as a “flawed 
> democracy” for the second year running, which indicates citizens’ deepening distrust of the country’s 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 “big sort”—the geographic self-segregation of 
> like-minded Americans—has 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 initiatives—and efforts by 
> legislatures to stop or negotiate them—will 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. “Overall, 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,” Josh Altic, the director of 
> the ballot-initiatives project at Ballotpedia, an online political encyclopedia, said. “The 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.”
>
> That year, the number of citizen initiatives that made state ballots (71) was more than double the total amount from 
> 2014. That’s despite 2016 following the long-term trend of shrinking ballot measures overall—which 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 decade—meaning 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 states’ 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 election’s record-low 
> turnout, voters did not trust their elected officials to get the job done, and thus turned to direct democracy. 
> “People were kind of fed up with either gridlock or opposition in state legislatures,” Altic explained. “You also 
> have the narrative of the swing towards Republican control over state legislatures since 2010. There’s obviously been 
> a big shift in that direction, so you see a lot of progressive citizen initiatives. That’s how you get these things 
> done if you don’t have the seats in the legislature.”
>
> The kinds of ballot initiatives that were certified in 2016—especially those that eventually passed that 
> November—provide 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 wasn’t 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 
> voters’ faith in democracy has only frayed since Donald Trump became president: Nearly 40 percent of voters in a 
> March SurveyMonkey poll indicated they’ve given up on democracy. So far, that disillusionment hasn’t translated to 
> more ballot initiatives in 2018. “We’re starting out with a much lower than average number at this point,” 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 doesn’t 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 2016’s 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.
>
> “The ballot-measure process is under attack,” Justine Sarver, the executive director of the progressive Ballot 
> Initiative Strategy Center, said. “There were many successful measures in 2016, and we’re seeing many conservative 
> governors saying, ‘I’m not going to implement that.’” 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. “Referendum is pure democracy and it has not worked for 15,000 years,” 
> he said in his final State of the State address in February.
>
> LePage’s 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 district—thus forcing petitioners to expend more money and energy in 
> districts where they might find less support. South Dakota is considering a similar plan. Arizona’s 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 past—the most significant being the Proposition 8 amendment that banned 
> same-sex marriage in California in 2008—Republican 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. “I would say we are seeing an increase in the number of proactive, progressive initiatives 
> in this decade,” Sarver said, “whether that’s around health, criminal justice, redistricting, and the economy, or 
> [reforms] relevant to democracy.”
>
> Still, among all of the causes Altic’s and Sarver’s groups are monitoring, the most prominent initiatives seem to be 
> those with strong bipartisan support nationally—just not necessarily in state legislatures.
>
> Facing the still-extant possibility of an Obamacare repeal by Trump and the national GOP—and just months after the 
> success of the Medicaid-expansion referendum in Maine—voters 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 they’ve forced the 
> state legislature to preemptively pass compromise laws that adopt most of the initiatives’ language. And across the 
> country, in response to the gerrymandering that’s 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. “Our initiative actually started from a Facebook post,” Katie Fahey, the group’s president, said. “I 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.”
>
> But Fahey’s post ballooned in popularity, thanks to what she identifies as an energy that was “huge and prevalent 
> across the state,” and across partisan and racial lines. “When you talked to people, they were just sick of the 
> status quo,” Fahey said. “They don’t trust politicians. They don’t 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.”
>
> Fahey has observed a blend of “drain-the-swamp-style” anti-establishment sentiment among other citizen-initiative 
> advocates she’s 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 Fahey’s words: “People are just tired of waiting, and so they were ready to go 
> and step up and get it done themselves.”
>
> We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters () theatlantic 
> com.
>
> VANN R. NEWKIRK II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.
> Kimi Wei
> kimi () thewei com  @kimiwei
> facebook.com/thekimiwei
> 862-203-8814




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