Voters in South Dakota sent a resounding message of their own to the state’s conservative power structure: We’re in charge here, not you.
Campaign signs on Tuesday, June 7, 2022, in Valley Spring, S.D., included one opposing a ballot measure that would have required most future referendums to pass with 60 percent support, rather than a simple majority.
But this wasn’t just a political process story. It was the latest round in a national fight between voters and state legislatures, who have been battling for primacy on issues like marijuana legalization, gerrymandering and health care. Last year, The New York Times’ Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti took a broad look at Republican-led efforts to limit ballot initiatives, which have grown only more intense in the last 12 months.
“Whenever citizens effectively use the ballot initiative to make policy changes the legislature opposes, lawmakers bite back, and they bite back hard,” Daley said. But there was a catch. The State Police could not do federal background checks. So the group behind the ballot drive, Arkansas Voters First, pulled what information it could from publicly available records and submitted thousands more signatures than required. The secretary of state rejected those background checks on the grounds that the canvassers had not “passed” and threw out more than 10,000 signatures.
A court later threw out the background-check requirement, but the cat-and-mouse game goes on: The Arkansas General Assembly passed a new law that lengthened the list of offenses that disqualify paid canvassers. And a measure similar to the one South Dakota voters just rejected, raising the threshold for successful ballot initiatives to 60%, is now on the ballot.
Then there’s the fact that Medicaid is popular. Voter-led petitions have already powered Medicaid expansion in Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks information and trends about the country’s health care system, has found that three-quarters of Americans hold a favorable opinion of the program — including 76% of independents and 65% of Republicans.
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