Ballot Measures are a Critical Tool for Pro-Choice Activism–So Republican Legislatures are Attempting to Restrict the Practice
Photo by Maddie McGarvey via the 19th News.
This election season, voters in Ohio approved two ballot measures: one creating a constitutional right to reproductive freedom in the state, and the other legalizing recreational marijuana use. Ohio is the seventh state to pass a pro-choice ballot measure since the Dobbs decision ended federal judicial protections for abortion access in 2022.
In California, Michigan, and Vermont, ballot measures created explicit protections for abortion access, while voters in Kentucky and Montana shot down anti-abortion ballot measures. Since the Dobbs decision, in every single state where abortion has been put on the ballot, voters have supported the right to choice. Pro-choice politicians have also made significant gains in elections across the country. Democrats won or retained a number of key governorships, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and flipped both houses of the Virginia legislature after Republicans there campaigned on a 15-week abortion “limit.”
Notably, support for the Ohio ballot measure was on average 10% higher than support for President Joe Biden in counties that he lost in 2020. This suggests that abortion access is not as strictly partisan as many would suggest, and opens up the opportunity for pro-choice movements to gain ground in purple or even red states by giving power directly to the people.
Abortion appears to be a losing issue for Republicans, even in states like Ohio and Kentucky. Their response? Change the rules of the game, not their policy goals.
In a number of states, Republican legislatures have moved to make it more difficult to create and approve ballot measures. In an effort to thwart the upcoming abortion ballot measures, Ohio legislators put forward a ballot proposal that would raise the threshold for a ballot measure from a simple majority to 60% of the vote, and a similar proposal was suggested in Missouri. Both were rejected by voters.
Republicans have also attempted to deploy biased and misleading language in ballot measures in order to deceive or manipulate the results of the vote. Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft of Missouri, for example, approved a ballot title that asked voters if they want to protect “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from contraception [sic] to live birth,” and “nullify longstanding Missouri law protecting the right to life.”
Not all efforts to stop the public from wielding their power to affect politics directly have failed, however. Arkansas took a different approach to hindering the process by passing a measure through the legislature rather than by a direct vote. The measure, passed by a Republican-majority legislature and signed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, raised the number of counties where signatures must be gathered to get an initiative on the ballot from 15 to 50. Florida has also added new hurdles to change the state constitution.
As Republicans pushed for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, their key argument was that abortion law should be returned to the hands of the states. Time and time again, however, citizens have rejected anti-abortion ballot measures and supported pro-choice ones with a margin beyond party lines: Ohio’s Issue 1, for example, passed with about 57% of the vote. Instead of being responsive to their constituents’ views, however, Republicans across the nation have doubled down efforts to hinder voters’ political power. Far from decentralizing power to make sure that voters’ values are reflected, the Republican agenda appears to be to restrict abortion by any means and at any cost to the people they’re meant to serve.
This is not the way democracy is meant to work. When the electorate disagrees with your policies and uses established political processes to prevent them from taking effect, the next step is to convince them that your approach is correct, not to alter mechanisms which date back to America's founding.
As James Madison himself wrote in his Federalist Papers: “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived, it seems strictly consonant to the republican theory to recur to the same original authority ... whenever it may be necessary to enlarge, diminish, or new-model the powers of government.”
For a party that claims a platform of small government, Republicans across the country seem oddly quick to put roadblocks in the way of citizen power. Republican legislatures’ efforts to weaken and confound ballot measures are a dangerous precedent to set. Thus far, voters have consistently rejected efforts to dilute their own power when given the choice.