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Here's how U.S. voters get a direct say on laws [1]
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Date: 2024-10-24 04:01:00+00:00
This fall, while American voters think about how to cast their votes for president, members of Congress and state officials, they’ll also be making some laws themselves.
A lesser-known part of U.S. democracy is that some states allow their citizens to enact new laws or vote down existing ones through ballot initiatives. States and some local governments allow citizens to gather signatures of support for certain ideas. If they obtain enough valid signatures, the issue is placed on Election Day ballots.
“Democracy means the people govern themselves,” says John Matsusaka, a law professor at the University of Southern California (USC). Initiatives, he says, “cut out the middlemen and make the laws directly.”
“One thing about American elections that is different is that we do things on a state basis,” says John C. Fortier, a senior fellow at the think tank American Enterprise Institute. While other democracies around the globe allow ballot initiatives to become national laws, ballot initiatives in the United States only make state and local laws. Fortier says that state-level focus is evident even in the framework of how we elect our national legislative body. U.S. senators and House members are elected at state and local levels and represent those specific constituencies when they report to Congress.
Initiatives by the numbers
Twenty-four states allow ballot initiatives to create laws. Separately, every state but Delaware allows ballot referendums on state constitutional amendments, says Matsusaka, who heads the Initiative and Referendum Institute at USC.
Some ballot measures are driven by citizens, while others originate with state legislatures that want voters to decide something.
By October, 147 measures were expected to appear on November 5 ballots in the states that allow them, as well as in the city of Washington, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. The measures range from whether to issue bonds for a particular project, like a new school, to weighty constitutional amendments.
In earlier elections, voters raised their states’ minimum wage, decided on rules on marijuana use and changed property tax rates. This year, popular ballot-measure topics include how elections are run, environmental practices, health care issues, educational quality proposals and new civil rights protections.
Citizens at work
The first state-level ballot initiative appeared on an Oregon ballot in 1904, according to Matsusaka’s institute (PDF, 482KB). And by 2021, 2,653 state-level initiatives had been voted on. Nearly half of them (42%) succeeded.
Sometimes, state lawmakers use ballot initiatives to test public support for something they want to do legislatively.
And at times, ballot measures give the public a say on issues about which a state legislature is reluctant to act.
Matsusaka sees downsides in that the citizen-sponsored measures can spark big spending by special interests that want to influence the outcomes and in that majority rule sometimes infringes on numerical minorities.
And Fortier says that political parties might push them as a way to get voters motivated to come to the polls to vote on candidates for office. The ballot questions are something of a safety valve though, he believes, for times when elected officials aren’t responsive on an issue that is important to voters.
These measures provide a window into “what’s on people’s minds and what groups want people to weigh in on,” Fortier says.
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