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]]>If you are frustrated with gridlock and/or intransigence in your state legislature, as many voters are, one way to get your issue considered is to gather signatures and take your proposal directly to voters with a ballot initiative. But that grassroots process—which has proliferated in recent years, as you may have noticed by measuring the length of your November 2018 ballot—is becoming much more difficult in many states.
Currently, 24 states—mostly in the Western half of the country—enable citizens to bypass the legislature with ballot initiatives. Here’s a list of who allows what.
Requirements vary. In general, if you want the next statewide ballot to include, for example, an anti-gerrymandering proposal, or an increase in the tax on gasoline, or an amendment to your state’s constitution, you must get a minimum number of registered voters to sign petitions.
In most states where this direct-democracy process is available, the number of signatures required to qualify for inclusion on the ballot is pegged to the number of voters who voted in the most recent governor’s race.
And that’s the problem. Voter turnout is the key. Low turnout in a governor’s election makes it easier to get petition signatures in later elections. While high turnout—ironically, something that we normally view as a fundamental [small-d] democratic value—works against grassroots signature-gathering efforts.
California offers an instructive example. To get an issue on the ballot in California, you must gather signatures equal to or greater than 8 percent of the number of ballots cast in the preceding gubernatorial election. In the 2014 election, only 30 percent of voters cast ballots. That meant that, in the next two election cycles (when there was no governor’s race scheduled), supporters of any ballot measure needed just 365,880 valid signatures. “The bar was so low,” reports The Hill, “that California’s ballots were inundated by initiatives: 15 citizen-sponsored ballot measures in 2016 and 8 more in 2018.”
But voters came out in much higher numbers in the 2018 election. “The result is that in 2020 and 2022, using the same 8 percent threshold, initiative supporters will need to collect more than 623,000 valid signatures, a 70 percent increase,” according to the Hill’s reporting.
A similar scenario is playing out in other initiative-petition states. Here are some examples:
ARIZONA
COLORADO
OKLAHOMA
Getting signatures on statewide initiatives is not free. And the need for more signatures means a need for more money. According to Ballotpedia, the average cost to get one signature varies from state to state, but signature-gathering consulting firms [yes, they exist—it’s not all high-minded volunteers] charge about $6 per valid signature. So, for example, if you want to get signatures in Colorado in 2020, you’re going to need around an additional $156,000. [Most petition gatherers try to get approximately 75 percent more signatures than the requirement, in order to account for signatures that will inevitably be ruled invalid.]
Some state legislators are ticked off about the uptick in ballot initiatives, and they’re working on placing more obstacles in the way. “What we’re seeing is death by a thousand paper cuts, says Lauren Simpson, of Americans for a Better Utah, “making it incrementally more difficult for citizens to pass laws on their own through ballot initiatives Our legislature, as a whole, is uncomfortable with citizen ballot initiatives.”
But, while legislative ploys may be devious and undemocratic, and while increased voter turnout has had the unintended consequence of raising the bar for citizen initiatives, at least this trend is happening in states where citizens have the option to get needed changes by grassroots efforts. In 26 other states, there’s no option at all for ballot measures, and no sign that politicians are eager to create one. That’s the biggest hurdle of all.
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]]>Republican governors, state legislators and secretaries of state have become shameless in their attempts to reverse the results of legitimately passed ballot initiatives. What they’re doing goes far beyond the coy, clever, clandestine dirty tricks that Republicans have honed over many years. They’re not just working behind the scenes: they’re out in the open, declaring publicly their intention to undo what voters have officially said they want.
This is not a rogue strategy: Judging from news reports from a variety of states, this is a trending Republican policy. According to the Washington post,
“In the past two years alone, legislators have filed more than 100 bills across 24 states aimed at reversing ballot measures, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which focuses on advancing progressive priorities through ballot initiatives.
“It’s a power grab,” the center’s executive director Chris Melody Fields Figueredo said last month. “It’s an attempt to take that power away from the people. It is counter to why we have democracy in the first place.”
“The ballot-measure process is under attack,” said Justine Sarver, the executive director of the center. “There were many successful measures in 2016, and we’re seeing many conservative governors saying, ‘I’m not going to implement that.’”
In November 2018, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved [62% to 38%] a constitutional amendment—dubbed “Clean Missouri”—that will impose campaign-contribution limits, restrict gifts to legislators, and change the way state legislative districts are drawn, to eliminate partisan gerrymandering.
But almost before the last vote was counted on the Clean Missouri initiative, Republican Governor Mike Parson vowed to get behind a legislative effort to repeal it—even though, he acknowledges, his support of a reversal doesn’t look good to voters. [This isn’t Parson’s first screw-the-voters effort: After Missouri voters approved a 2011 initiative that would have shut down inhumane “puppy mills,” Parson—then a state legislator—led a successful legislative drive that put puppy mills back in business even before the new law could take effect.]
Rumor has it that one Republican legislator is preparing to pre-file a bill in the 2019 Missouri legislative session that would undo Clean Missouri immediately. And within days of Clean Missouri’s decisive victory, a new group—with the Orwellian name “Fair Missouri”—began raising money for a new ballot initiative that would erase what voters had just approved.
Missouri is not new to this game. The state has a sordid recent history of undermining, invalidating and/or sabotaging voter-approved initiatives. Here are a few examples:
For the record, it’s not illegal for Missouri’s legislature to pass laws that reverse the provisions of voter-approved ballot initiatives. According to Ballotpedia, only two states—Arizona and California—have actually made it illegal to change an initiative substantively without sending it back to the voters. In fact, 11 states (and D.C.) can change or repeal initiatives at will, without any restrictions on how soon, or with what majority the legislative body can act.
But, while it may be legal, thumbing your legislative nose at voters reeks of unfairness and a sore-loser, anti-democracy mentality.
“There’s little disagreement that, after offering the choice up to people at the ballot boxes, it’s symbolically fraught to take it away,” writes Sarah Holder, at CityLab. Holder quotes former Washington DC mayor Anthony Williams as saying, “We are facing a situation that is never good for a democracy. The people appear to have spoken, and yet their elected officials are saying, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.”
As we learned in eighth-grade Civics class, ballot initiatives came about as a way for citizens to be a final check and balance on their representatives. That’s an important principle, and it should be respected. Unfortunately, in Missouri as in too many other states, too many elected officials clearly regard “the will of the people” as merely a suggestion, rather than as a right, and they’re making it their official policy to salute voters with their middle-fingers.
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]]>Who says voting can’t be entertaining? Here are some of the more unusual ballot measures that will be slowing up the already long-enough lines in the 2012 Presidential election:
Condoms for porn stars
Voters in Los Angeles County, California will get a chance to vote on whether actors in porn movies filmed in L.A. County must wear condoms and practice safe sex on camera. The Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act – also known as Measure B – is a response to ongoing stories about outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases among workers in one of Southern California’s most lucrative industries.
Whose Grand Canyon is it, anyway?
In Arizona, state-sovereignty advocates are sponsoring Proposition 120, which declares the state’s “sovereign and exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within its boundaries.” This idea has prompted Salon to ask if the state is attempting to wrest control of the Grand Canyon from the federal government.
Corps ain’t peeps, at least not around here
In Northern California, the city of Arcata is has Proposition H, declaring that corporations are not persons. If passed, within the City of Arcata, corporations would not be treated as “natural persons and are not entitled to the protections granted by the United States Constitution to natural persons.” The stated purpose of this initiative is a long-term goal of changing federal and/or state law to be consistent with this understanding of corporations.
Don’t be cruel
In North Dakota, Measure 5 takes aim at those who inflict harm on cats, dogs or horses. According to WDAZ.com, “the measure provides a possible five-year prison term for extreme cruelty to cats, dogs and horses. It lists beating, poisoning, burning, suffocating and crushing as examples of extreme cruelty. The measure says anyone convicted of felony animal cruelty could be barred from owning a cat, dog or horse for up to five years.”
Change redistricting, um, never mind
This should help speed things up in California: a ballot measure that voters can skip over, because it’s original sponsors decided that they don’t actually support it after all. I’ll leave it to a more knowledgeable Daily Kos blogger to explain it all for us:
Proposition 40. This one is funny, precisely because it’s so sad. This measure is ultimately an outgrowth of the new redistricting policy we have in California, where a so-called “Citizens’ Redistricting Commission” draws all the lines. When the maps for the new state Senate maps were drafted, Republicans felt that the new map would be much worse for them than the old map…But after the measure made it to the ballot, the Republicans realized that—oops!—the new maps weren’t so bad for them after all, so now they’re declining to campaign for the measure that they themselves put on the ballot. This measure is slightly confusing, however, because a “yes” vote keeps the new maps, while a “no vote” throws them out.
On the beach?
Hoping to attract tourists and, possibly, a hotel development, the city of Guadalupe, California is asking voters to decided whether the city should change its name to Guadalupe Beach. There’s only one small problem: Guadalupe is not a seaside town. The Pacific Ocean is five miles west of the city.
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]]>On the morning of November 7, we may owe the Golden State a great big “thank you” note. Perhaps the almost one million Californians who signed the petition putting Proposition 37 on California’s ballot on November 6 already deserve one.
Proposition 37 is an initiative to require the labeling of raw or processed foods sold in retail stores in California that contain food products produced through genetic engineering (GMOs). As proponents and food activists across the country point out, Proposition 37 is not an outright ban on the sale of any food. What it is, however, is a straightforward, right-to-know about what’s contained in the food Californians (and we) buy.
Food-activist Californians are hoping to succeed where Connecticut and Vermont have failed. And the stakes are high. California’s thirty-eight million people consume twelve percent of all food products in the U.S. That means where California goes so goes the rest of the nation.
What is the controversy about genetically engineered food?
Genetically engineered food is the end product of a technology-based process that does not occur naturally. That process inserts genetic material from a variety of sources—such as other plants and animals or viruses or bacteria—which would not have been a natural source for genetic material for that particular plant or meat product. Often the intention is to render a plant resistant to a particular herbicide or pesticide. Custom-designed genes that don’t exist in nature have been inserted as well. An example is Monsanto’s newest experimental GMO sweet corn from which you and your kids may soon be ingesting, as the Center for Food Safety bluntly describes it, “a toxic pesticide in every bite.”
If you think this is an issue that doesn’t concern you, think again. If you buy processed food from the supermarket, you’ve been consuming and feeding your families GMOs since the 1990s without knowing it. In fact, GMOs are hidden in such commonly purchased items on supermarket shelves as baby formula, soups, crackers, condiments, cereals, and many processed, boxed foods that contain corn oil, corn syrup, corn starch, soy, canola, cottonseed oil, wheat, or sugar beets. Some experts in the field estimate that more than seventy-five percent of all processed foods contain GMOs. And the long-term health affects are simply not known.
What you don’t know could be hurting you
The Nation has reported that, in 1999, attorney Steven Druker, while combing through 40,000 pages of FDA files, found “memorandum after memorandum contain[ing] warnings about the unique hazards of genetically engineered food.” At the time, Druker reported that he found information indicating that GMOs could contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.” More recent FDA documents put the safety of GMOs in question as well, such as this one from FDA scientists that reiterated that GMOs could cause “unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, and nutritional problems.”
Why can’t we know for sure what foods contain GMOs? The answer is that the FDA and EPA do not require labeling of GMOs nor studies to determine their safety. Proposition 37 seeks to address the labeling requirement on the state level. Support for such labeling outside the ag-biotech world is overwhelming. Polls indicate that 65% of Californians support the measure. Nationally, support for federally required labeling comes in at 91%.
Let’s consider one of the most common food products: corn. Here, in the Northeast where I live, the beautiful stands of corn are a reminder of an agricultural heritage from the time before America was America.
What you may not know is the degree to which chemical and pharmaceutical companies, including two of the largest, Monsanto and Syngenta, have altered that heritage. GMO corn has been altered to resist weed killers and even to produce herbicides within the plant’s own tissues.
Coming soon to a Walmart near you
If you can’t wait to get your hands on some of Monsanto’s creations, you won’t have to wait long. Coming soon to a Walmart near you in the canned and frozen-food aisles is Monsanto’s GMO sweet corn containing the company’s own herbicide, Roundup. In the works is a GMO apple that will not brown when cut. Don’t hold your breath, though, waiting for Walmart to tout the origin of the corn or the apples in their advertisements, signage, or labeling. Fortunately, other food companies have decided not to follow Walmart’s example. Green Giant and Cascadian Farms (both of General Foods), Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods have committed to keeping Monsanto’s sweet corn out of their products and off their shelves.
Those four food companies are sending a message about food safety that more than fifty countries (or forty percent of the world’s population), including members of the European Union, the UK, Japan, China, India, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, Australia, and Russia, who require labeling or have outright bans on GMOs, agree with.
Who’s against Prop 37?
For big ag and big pharma, this is a high-stakes fight. How determined are they to defeat the measure? If determination is measured in dollars, their commitment is deep. According to Food Integrity Campaign, to date the No on 37 Campaign has bundled a war chest containing $32 million. Of that amount, $19 million comes from just six of the biggest and baddest with the most at stake: Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer, Dow, BASF, and Syngenta. If Proposition 37 passes, GMO producers understand that the required labeling, which will give consumers information they need to make informed choices about what’s in their food and which foods they’ll buy, will sweep in a revolution in food production in this country. And you can bet that’s going to affect the bottom line of some of America’s most powerful corporations.
Keep a close watch on what happens in California. This is going to be one helluva food fight.
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]]>The post Psst! Wanna see what your ballot will look like this year? appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Everyone knows there is an election coming up. (It’s on November 6, 2012.) Not everyone knows that you can see your ballot in advance. It’s easy and takes about 1 minute. No matter where you live, you can see your sample ballot at Vote USA. The site asks you to type in either your 9-digit zip code, or, if you don’t know that, your street address. Voila! The ballot for your area–including all national, state and local candidates and ballot issues–shows up on your screen. It’s a fantastic and free service courtesy of your government.
If you’re curious what a sample ballot looks like, you can see mine here.
Now that you know what’s on the ballot, there’s no excuse to not do a bit of research and go vote.
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]]>Three measures in Missouri garnered enough petition signatures to make it on the November 2012 ballot, but will Missourians’ conviction be enough? With nearly twice the required minimum number of signatures on each petition, Missourians submitted ballot measures to raise the minimum wage, increase the country’s lowest cigarette tax, and cap loan annual percentage rates (APR) at 36%. Once reviewed and approved by the Missouri Secretary of State, they should be on the November ballot, but opposition is fierce.
Moneyed interests are fighting the petition to cap loan APR’s with bully tactics that include physically preventing signers from accessing petitions, harassing signature gatherers and signers, perhaps even breaking into a gatherer’s car to steal more than 2,000 signatures. Payday lenders and their enablers also filed a lawsuit claiming that the language of the measure is “deceptive.” Faith leaders and proponents disagreed.
In early April, a circuit court judge sided with lenders, ruling the petition’s language “insufficient, unfair, likely to deceive petition signers and voters.” The Missouri attorney general’s office filed an appeal of the ruling, but now the opponents of the cap are pushing Secretary of State Robin Carnahan to invalidate the more than 180,000 signatures in order to keep it off the ballot in November.
It is clear from the sheer number of signatures alone that many Missourians agree the current annual percentage rate of payday and title loans is exorbitant. Efforts to inform voters are paying off. More than 430% APR on a single small loan does little to help low-income people—who are overwhelmingly targeted by these types of lenders—stem the tide of debt, and Missourians know this. Voters’ interests, however, may not be enough against a huge Missouri predatory lending industry willing to bully, buy, and lawyer their way to victory.
It may come as little surprise that big tobacco is also waging a battle to prevent Missourians from voting to raise Missouri’s tobacco tax from 17 cents to 90 cents per pack. Despite garnering over 220,000 signatures and an apparent mandate, this ballot measure’s language was also challenged in court. A trial judge in Cole County recently upheld the measure’s language, declaring it clear and fair. Pending the secretary of state’s review and approval, the measure could make it to the ballot.
It’s worth noting, however, that the Missouri legislature had quite a few bills last session regarding a cigarette tax increase and unilaterally failed to bring them to the floor. Again, this is not a big surprise, especially given this year’s antics and the many failures of the Missouri legislature to enact laws for the greater good. (What happened to all those jobs we were promised?)
Voters have also defeated efforts to raise the tobacco tax twice in the last decade. Recent budget cut battles, austerity measures, and public sector layoffs may convince them that increased tobacco tax is much-needed revenue for education and smoking cessation programs.
The Missouri Chamber of Commerce is opposing the ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $8.25 from its current level of $7.25 per hour and also allows for increases every year based on inflation. Opponents claim paying employees a full dollar more per hour is a financial hardship on employers during “fragile” economic times and could abate hiring, but they made the same claim in 2006 when the economy was in better shape, and unemployment was about half the levels we’ve been seeing.
There is no evidence to suggest that giving low wage workers a small raise in itself harms the job market, though it’s not difficult to argue that paying people too little is seriously distressing for millions of families. All three of the Republican candidates currently duking it out [in extreme fashion] in the primary to run against Claire McCaskill could not even tell you what the minimum wage is, much less how detrimental or beneficial it is. And yet they all oppose increasing the minimum wage for Missourians and across the country. Disconnect much?
Wages nationwide and around the world have scarcely kept pace with inflation, as countless experts and economists have asserted. Though our personal hardships may be a testament to this fact, it is difficult to predict whether an extremely and increasingly polarized red state—complete with newly drawn political districts–will disregard all the paid-for political noise and vote in their own best interests.
We’ll find out in November.
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]]>No one is certain about what multi-millionaire Rex Sinquefield is up to. He’s not running for any political office. But we do know that doesn’t like the 1% city earnings tax levied on people who live or work in St. Louis and Kansas City. So he’s spending more than $7 million of his own money to promote a ballot initiative—of his own design—that could end the earnings tax as a primary source of funding for Missouri’s two biggest cities. And he just might buy his way into getting his pet project—Proposition A—passed on Nov. 2, an outcome opposed by every major daily newspaper in Missouri.
But this is not just a Missouri story. Sinquefield’s personal ballot-issue crusade puts him in some pretty fast company in several other states. According to The American Spectator,
… initiatives are the brainchildren of special interests or very rich individuals riding hobbyhorses — and funded by them. Proponents try to characterize and title them as “good government” measures as American as apple pie. More than a few of these become a curse on the electorate because they dramatically increase the state’s bonded indebtedness or tinker permanently with the state’s budget.
Sometimes, individuals bankroll ballot issues that promote their ideas of the role of government. CBS News recently reported that, “In Seattle, Bill Gates Sr. has plowed $400,000 of his own money into an initiative that would impose an income tax on the wealthy. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has countered with $100,000 opposing the initiative according to campaign filings…But wealthy interests can sometimes be personal. In 2008, Alaskan financier Bob Gillam indirectly gave $1.6 million to fund a referendum to stop a mine from being built near his fishing lodge.”
Here’s a look at a few other moneyed individuals in other states, who have figured out how to use ballot initiatives to advance their own political and/or financial agendas.
Big money in California
California is the granddaddy of ballot-initiative states, and big spenders are making their presence felt in 2010 more than ever. According to the California Fair Political Practices Commission [FPPC], “…the tens of millions of dollars from large donors flowing into the ballot initiative campaigns is once again the big story when it comes to the influence of big money in California politics.” An October 11, 2010 FPPC report highlights the largest ballot-initiative donations from individuals.
Charles T. Munger, Jr. has contributed more than $7.4 million to “Yes on 20” [Congressional Redistricting Initiative.] If passed, it would “remove elected representatives from the process of establishing congressional districts and transfer that authority to recently-authorized 14-member redistricting commission comprised of Democrats, Republicans, and representatives of neither.” Munger himself submitted the ballot language. He is an occasional activist in California ballot proposition politics, an experimental physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the son of the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.
Thomas Steyer, is not the author of California’s Proposition 23, but his financial involvement is noteworthy. In fact, he opposes the measure, and he has contributed $5 million to “No on 23.” If passed, Proposition 23 would suspend California’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, the state’s landmark clean air legislation. Steyer, a hedge fund manager, is a philanthropist and environmentalist who is one of 40 billionaires who earlier this year signed The Giving Pledge to donate half their fortune to charity.
S.K. Seymour LLC, whose president is Richard Lee, contributed more than $1.5 million in support of Proposition 19, known as the “Regulate, Tax, Control Cannabis” initiative. If it passes, “cities and counties would be allowed – but not required – to adopt ordinances that license and regulate the cultivation, processing, distribution, transportation and sale of marijuana.” S.K. Seymour, of Oakland, does business as Oaksterdam University, whose webpage says it is “America’s first cannabis college” and provides “students with the highest quality training for the cannabis industry.”
Colorado: all in the family
Most of the money behind three 2010 ballot issues in Colorado comes from members of one wealthy family. The initiatives—Amendment 60, Amendment 61 and Proposition 101 would “end fees that [members of the Hasan family] say are essentially taxes, force local and state governments to live within their means, and strengthen the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights”, a government-limiting measure passed in Colorado in 1992. The Hasans are large contributors to Republican candidates and causes. Unfortunately for the Hasans, the $12,000 they have contributed to help pass the 2010 amendments is vastly overmatched by the $4.1 million raised by opponents of the ballot issues, says the Colorado Springs Gazette.
“Citizen” initiatives in WA
Tim Eyman is a one-man ballot-initiative machine. He doesn’t fit the multi-millionaire category, but as Washington state’s most prolific sponsor of right-wing, anti-tax ballot measures, he deserves a mention. Having sponsored ballot measures every year since 1997, Eyman’s 2010 project is Initiative 1053, which would require a two-thirds supermajority in the Washington state legislature to raise taxes. And while he may not be rich, he gained notoriety in 2002 for mis-appropriating ballot-initiative funds and paying himself a salary higher than that of any elected state official.
Live from New York
New York City’s Howard Rich is a real-estate developer who has been active in politics for almost 40 years. He is known for “funding libertarian oriented political initiatives such as term limits, school choice, parental rights regarding education, limited government and property rights.” In the early 1980s, he was active in the Libertarian Party and worked with billionaire Charles Koch [one of the Koch brothers who currently are contributing massive amounts of money to right-wing causes].
In 1992, Rich founded U.S. Term Limits and was instrumental in getting “term limits imposed on 15 state legislatures, on the mayors and city councils of eight of the ten largest cities in America, and on constitutional officers in 37 states.” In 2006, Rich supported—to the tune of $1.77 million—a ballot initiative in California called “Proposition 90” that barred cities from using eminent domain. He also championed and financially underwrote similar initiatives in other states, with donations that totaled an estimated $15 million.
Trouble in Oregon
Oregon’s Bill Sizemore has been a major figure in state politics and ballot proposals since the 1990s. A founder of Oregon’s Tax Revolt, Sizemore is the state’s most prolific author of ballot initiatives, and checkbook behind most of them. In 2006, of 37 initiatives filed, 15 of them came from Sizemore. According to Oregon Live, in 2008, Sizemore’s anti-union, anti-tax initiatives included:
Apparently, he never quits, although “every Sizemore measure has been rejected by voters, overturned by the courts or changed by legislators.”
Sizemore was the 1998 Republican nominee for Oregon governor, and he ran again in the 2010 primary, but he finished fourth in a nine-person race. Currently, Sizemore and his wife are fighting charges filed by the Oregon Department of Justice alleging felony tax evasion for failing to file state tax returns in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Sizemore has no ballot initiatives on the 2010 ballot.
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