Voters in several states will get the chance to do what congressional Republicans tried and failed to do: approve a measure to require voter ID at the polls.
Ballot initiatives to require voter ID await voters in California, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio, as do scores of other issues that will be decided on Election Day. Voters in some states will weigh in on redistricting, tax measures, marijuana regulations and traffic cameras. In Idaho, a state question will ask voters to choose the state’s official firearm.
Across the country, state lawmakers have put on the ballot the issues federal lawmakers haven’t taken up from either side of the aisle, according to a Washington Sun analysis of over 100 state ballot questions across the country.
“There’s a central playbook where D.C. funnels down into the states these various initiatives and ballot measures to achieve policy goals that they can’t achieve on the federal level,” said Randy Keating, a Democratic City Council member in Tempe, Arizona, who is fighting against the states’ voter ID requirement measure.
Trending
California State Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican working in support of his state’s voter ID ballot item, said the measures are popping up right now because of low public confidence in elections, not a coordinated push.
The reason for a ballot measure is political inaction, DeMaio said, pointing to polling figures that show strong support for stricter voter ID laws.
It’s a “70% issue, and yet our politicians can’t get their shit together to get it done,” DeMaio said of strengthening voter ID laws. “We have to go to a ballot measure because politicians have failed us on both sides of the aisle on this important issue.”
The same thing is happening across the country on other issues. In more than 10 states, voters will be presented propositions on how their states handle taxes. Colorado, Missouri and Maryland voters will be asked about redistricting. And voters in Colorado, Nebraska and Washington will confront constitutional amendments that, if approved, would ban transgender student athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Logan Casey, the director of policy research at the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project, said that some ballot measures reflect a “tactical shift” in how to push policies otherwise unlikely to pass in those states’ legislatures.
Casey pointed to Colorado and Washington as examples. The two states, which largely vote for Democrats, have ballot measures targeting transgender students’ participation in sports — policies that have failed to pass through the states’ legislatures in prior years.
“Those are two states that have had sports bans and other anti-trans bills introduced many years in a row, but have never been successful advancing through the legislature,” Casey said. “So there, the motivation is ‘Well, maybe we can get these policies enacted if we take it to the ballot box directly.’”
In states where the measures are popular or already implemented, redundant ballot measures could be a way for proponents to turn out voters in a midterm year; midterms tend to have lower turnout rates.
“It’s a bit of a different tactic, where they presumably are wanting to keep this issue front of mind for voters because they perceive it to be a winning electoral strategy or a wedge issue for them to use to turn out their own voters in a consequential midterm year,” Casey said.
Keating, the Tempe council member, said he thinks Arizona’s ballot measure on voter ID is in part meant to motivate Republican voters.
“What we’re seeing here is definitely a ploy to get the base of turnout for an unpopular president in, frankly, what is a terrible political environment for his party,” Keating said.
Similar ballot measures in different states are sometimes coordinated, said Mary-Beth Moylan, a law professor at the University of the Pacific who focuses on ballot measures. People see the measures as a way to get directly involved in a national political conversation, she said, but the measures require outsized spending and efforts.
“I do think people view the initiative process as a way to enter the national political discussion,” Moylan said. “I also think there are very organized big-money groups that cross state lines that are promoting particular ideas.”
Author
