(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Red State Legislators Work to Throttle Direct Democracy. [1] ['Glenn Daigon', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Crimson Quillfeather', 'Gary Turner'] Date: 2026-09-19 This article was originally published in the media outlet, WhoWhatWhy. “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.” This constitutional amendment, when it went before Florida voters in 2024, passed by a wide margin, with over 57 percent of the vote. On paper it appeared to be a significant win for the pro-choice movement in a red state. However, appearances are deceiving. That is because under the Florida constitution, unless a ballot initiative passes with 60 percent of the vote, it doesn’t become law. This new threshold doomed the measure. Nor is this example a one-off. As voters in red states have passed progressive ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, requiring employers to provide their workers with paid leave, expanding Medicaid, banning gerrymandering, and bolstering reproductive rights, Republican legislators in those same states have worked hard to undercut or outright repeal the measures. But there are increasing signs that both grassroots voters and advocates of these initiatives are fighting back against the GOP’s sabotage of the will of the people. Emma Olson Sharkey, a partner with the law firm The Political Law Group, does not see the fact that most of these progressive initiatives were placed before voters in red states as an accident. She noted: The direct democracy process has been used by progressives in states [where they] don’t have as much power … to actually pass progressive policies that have meaningful outcomes to people in those states. Sharkey also did not see these actions by red state legislators to hamstring progressive ballot proposals as isolated incidents. “I think this is part of the Republican movement to create a more restricted process. It is the movement from the majority will to minority demand of what and how we govern ourselves,” she said. Some of the specifics of what has been termed as the conservatives’ “Anti-Ballot Measure Playbook” include: Raising the Approval Threshold. In 2024, Florida Republican state legislators proposed raising the threshold for ballot initiatives to pass from 60 percent to 66.67 percent — a two-thirds majority. Restricting Ballot Qualification. Making proposals harder to get on the ballot by mandating background checks for signature gatherers, forcing voters signing petitions to provide drivers’ licenses or Social Security numbers, and capping initiative sponsors to one ballot proposal per election cycle. Manipulating Ballot Language. Conservative secretaries of state in Ohio and Missouri have been cited for distorting the final election ballot language on anti-gerrymandering and pro-choice initiatives to make them as unattractive as possible to voters. Repealing or Gutting Voter-Approved Laws. In 2024, Missouri voters passed measures to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and require employers to provide their workers with paid leave. That did not stop the Republicans in the state Legislature from almost immediately repealing the paid leave mandate and watering down the minimum wage hike. Yet there are even more egregious individual examples of laws suppressing direct democracy than these four categories. A recently passed Florida law adds a tall stack of hurdles, restrictions, costs, and punishments to an already onerous petition process, including requiring an investigation into any initiative where fewer than 75 percent of the signatures pass legal muster. “What I think we are seeing now in states like Florida is really an effort to criminalize democracy,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a nonprofit that describes its mission as leveraging ballot measures to strengthen democracy. “In 2024, they actually in Florida sent law enforcement to the doors — knocking on the doors of people who signed the abortion ballot measure. I think all of this — to us at BISC and I think others is part of the rising authoritarianism across the United States,” she asserted. But Florida’s law may not be the most extreme one as far as undercutting direct democracy. After being on the losing end for several election cycles of voter-approved progressive ballot initiatives, conservative Republican legislators in Missouri struck back with a novel ballot initiative of their own. This August they placed a measure on the ballot that would require any statewide measure to get majorities in all eight congressional districts to pass. Under this change, if a future ballot measure passed statewide by an overall majority — even in a landslide of, say, 70 percent — but if it lost by 1 percent in a single district, it would be defeated. Republicans argued the provision was necessary to ensure the voices of rural voters would not be drowned out by voters in more densely populated cities and suburbs. In practice, it confers potential veto power on a small minority of voters concentrated anywhere in the state. “At the end of the day our Constitution is founded on the idea of one person, one vote,” responded Sharkey. Is a Voter Backlash Building? There are signs that voters in red states may be getting fed up with the more heavy-handed tactics conservatives have resorted to against direct democracy. The GOP initiative to raise the threshold to require a majority vote in every congressional district for the passage of ballot measures went before Missouri voters in early August and lost by a margin of 4-to-1. And that is not the only case of voters roundly rejecting efforts to raise the thresholds for ballot measures. In the summer of 2023, Republican legislators in Ohio placed an initiative before voters to raise the threshold for successful ballot initiatives from a simple majority of votes statewide to a 60 percent supermajority. This was widely seen as a move to make passage of an upcoming pro-choice ballot initiative on that November’s ballot much more difficult. The measure was defeated by Ohio voters, getting less than 43 percent of the vote in August of that year. The November initiative protecting reproductive rights in Ohio passed by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. However, had the earlier initiative raising the threshold requirement for passage to 60 percent been successful, that measure would have failed, as it did in Florida. ‘Bulletproofing’ Progressive Ballot Measures Burned by GOP legislators either watering down or outright repealing hard-fought initiative victories, some grassroots citizen activists have tried different approaches to “bulletproof” their wins — taking legal approaches that make their victories at the ballot box less vulnerable to being upended. One such approach is to draft initiatives in the form of constitutional amendments that, if passed, become part of that state’s constitution guaranteeing certain rights. For example, the 2023 Ohio ballot initiative was drafted as a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right of Ohio citizens to make their own personal decisions regarding abortion, contraception, and fertility treatment. In November 2022, Illinois voters passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right of Illinois workers to organize and collectively bargain while blocking anti-union right-to-work legislation. This November, Virginia voters will vote on three initiatives that would guarantee reproductive rights, rights to same-sex marriage, and rights of ex-felons to vote as amendments to that state’s constitution. Typically, constitutional amendments are harder to repeal, making them much less vulnerable to being upended than a simple statute. “There are a number of things that you can do, but the most important thing is putting the process in the state constitution and making it clear that this is a fundamental right of the people. This is something we are seeing across states as well, this movement to make the ballot measure process stronger,” said Sharkey. Overwhelming political pressure can also be used on politicians who block democracy. Initiative 77 went before DC voters in 2018. It would have phased out the lower $5.35 minimum wage of tipped restaurant workers in favor of the much higher minimum wage non-tipped workers enjoy. After the DC City Council blocked it from going into effect, organizers brought it back on the ballot in 2022 where it passed with nearly three-quarters of the vote. In the face of overwhelming public support, opposition from the Council eventually collapsed. Figueredo sees these political conflicts in a larger context: “This is ultimately about giving people power and giving them opportunity to have a say in our government, in governing their daily lives. And really for the last decade, direct democracy has been one of the last lines of defense against policies that are incredibly harmful to the most vulnerable communities. And we have seen that voters, when given the opportunity, will enact bold solutions to ensure that we just don’t survive, but actually thrive.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/19/800100434/community/red-state-legislators-work-to-throttle-direct-democracy/ 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/