In a campaign season where the health of American democracy is hotly debated, voters in almost 20 states will get a chance to decide whether to change some of the basic rules of elections.
Those changes could broaden — or restrict — the power that voters have.
The questions are being raised in ballot initiatives and in referendums on amending state constitutions, measures that have increasingly become vehicles for groups looking to shore up what they say is a deeply flawed political system.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have put questions about elections or voting on their ballots this fall, some of them triggering multimillion-dollar campaigns on both sides of the issue. Several have met stiff resistance from state legislatures and political leaders.
Dozens of other issues are also on state ballots this year. Three states — Colorado, Nebraska and Kentucky — have questions about using public money to subsidize students who want to attend private schools. Six states have proposals to increase the minimum wage or mandate paid sick leave. Five states are asking voters whether to legalize medical or recreational marijuana or “natural psychedelics.” Abortion-rights measures are on the ballot in 10 states.
But more proposals to overhaul election rules in the name of curbing partisanship and political power are on the ballot this year than in any other year since ballot initiatives first were instituted more than a century ago, said Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, a Colorado-based organization that has spent millions supporting such proposals.
Facing well-funded campaigns to defeat the proposals, Troiano said his group will consider it a good year if even one additional state adopts ranked-choice voting, open primaries or a ban on gerrymandering. “We’re playing the long game,” he said.
Here’s a look at the changes being proposed.
Election rules
Voters in nine states and Washington, D.C., are deciding whether to institute — or, in a couple of cases, to ban or repeal — open primary election systems designed to reduce partisanship; ranked-choice voting, in which voters rate candidates in their order of preference; or both.
Alaska’s decision to adopt open primaries and ranked-choice voting produced big changes in 2022 when it was first used. The changes helped produce a state Legislature known for across-the-aisle cooperation and resulted in the first Alaska Native, a Democrat, being sent to Congress.
But it angered Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, a Republican who lost the race for the state’s only House seat. Republican figures have been the main supporters of a ballot proposal to repeal both 2022 changes. Out-of-state groups that support ranked-choice voting and open primaries as a way of reducing partisanship have put millions of dollars into campaigns against repeal.
Elsewhere, voters in Colorado, Idaho and Nevada will consider adopting primary and general election voting systems similar to Alaska’s, while proposals in Arizona, Montana and South Dakota would mandate open primaries. (Arizona’s Republican-controlled state Legislature, meanwhile, has placed its own proposal on the ballot that would require partisan primaries.)
Measures in Oregon and Washington, D.C. would implement ranked-choice voting, while in Missouri, the Republican-run state Legislature approved a ballot measure that would ban ranked-choice voting.
Gerrymandering
Ohio voters approved amending the state constitution in 2015 and 2018 to ban partisan gerrymandering, only to see the Republican-controlled state legislature gerrymander the state anyway after the 2020 census.
This year, a new and supposedly airtight ban on partisan maps is on the ballot as a constitutional amendment, and again, Republicans are pushing back. The summary of the proposal that appears on voters’ ballots features a warning that is ominous and misleading. The language says the proposal would set up a “taxpayer funded” commission that would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts.” But the actual proposal would ban partisan gerrymandering.
After a Republican-controlled board approved the wording, Citizens Not Politicians, the group backing the amendment, filed a lawsuit opposing the description to the Ohio Supreme Court. The court’s four Republicans voted to uphold the language; the three Democrats voted to strike it down.
Ballot measures
Republican-controlled legislatures in two states have written ballot measures that would, if approved, make it much harder for voters to put their own measures on future ballots.
In Arizona, the state constitution currently requires supporters of constitutional amendments to gather signatures statewide equaling 15% of the vote in the last governor’s election, or 10% if the measure proposes a citizen-backed state law. The legislators’ proposal would require supporters to meet those thresholds in each state legislative district, not statewide.
The North Dakota legislature proposes to raise the signature threshold for any measure to 5%, from the current 4%, and to require voters to approve each measure twice — once in a primary election, where turnout is typically minuscule, and again in a general election.
Noncitizen voting
It is already illegal for people who are not American citizens to vote in federal or state elections. (Noncitizens can vote in local contests in 19 cities.)
But noncitizen voting has become a staple of Republican claims of voter fraud, and claims of illegal voting by foreigners have been a persistent refrain in former President Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Republican legislatures in eight states — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — propose amending state constitutions to outlaw voting by noncitizens.
• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
