In most of American government, elected representatives make the laws. But in roughly half the states, citizens have a powerful tool to bypass their legislatures entirely: the ballot measure. Through initiatives, referendums, and recalls, voters can enact statutes, amend constitutions, repeal laws, and even remove officials from office, all without a single vote from a legislator.
- Historical Origins
- Types of Ballot Measures
- Which States Allow What
- The Qualification Process
- Approval Thresholds
- 2026 Elections
Looking for the legislative pushback against ballot measures, including thresholds, qualification restrictions, ballot language fights, and post-vote repeals? See The Anti-Ballot Measure Playbook.
Historical Origins
Direct democracy in the United States traces its roots to the Progressive Era of the 1890s–1920s. Reformers, responding to widespread corruption in politics and state legislatures, sought mechanisms to transfer lawmaking power directly to citizens rather than relying solely on their representatives.
South Dakota pioneered the approach in 1898, becoming the first state to authorize the popular initiative and referendum at the statewide level. Over the next two decades, nearly half the states amended their constitutions to authorize some form of initiative, referendum, or recall process. Oregon adopted its own system in 1902 and quickly became the model for the nationwide movement.
Today, the legacy of that Progressive Era remains the backbone of direct democracy across 26 states. While the specific rules vary enormously from state to state, the core principle endures: when legislatures fail to act, or act against the public’s will, voters can take matters into their own hands.
Types of Ballot Measures
The term “ballot measure” is an umbrella that covers several distinct mechanisms, each with its own rules, scope, and availability across the states.
Citizens draft a proposed statute or constitutional amendment, collect the required number of voter signatures, and place it directly on the ballot, bypassing the legislature entirely. This is the most powerful form of direct democracy and the one most commonly associated with “ballot measures.”
Like a direct initiative, but with an extra step: the proposed measure must first be submitted to the legislature for review. This gives lawmakers a chance to act before the proposal goes to voters. If lawmakers approve it, it bypasses the governor and becomes law. If they don’t, it proceeds to the ballot.
When a legislature passes a law that citizens oppose, they can collect signatures to place that law on the ballot, effectively asking voters whether to keep it. The law is typically suspended until voters weigh in. Veto referendums are rare even in the states that authorize them, and most that qualify end with voters siding against the legislature—a “no” vote repeals the challenged law.
Rather than citizens placing measures on the ballot, the legislature itself refers a measure to voters. The most common legislative referrals are proposed constitutional amendments, which require voter ratification in 49 states. Legislatures in 23 states can also refer proposed statutes. Across the country, legislatively referred measures typically outnumber citizen-initiated measures by a wide margin.
Less Common Forms
- Advisory Referendum: A non-binding question placed on the ballot to gauge voter opinion. The result carries political weight but no legal force.
- Statute Affirmation (Nevada only): A unique mechanism allowing citizens to ask voters to affirm an existing law, effectively immunizing it from future legislative modification.
- Recall: Nineteen states authorize the recall of state officials, allowing citizens to petition to remove them from office before their term ends. Eight of those states require specific grounds like malfeasance or conviction; the rest let voters recall officials for any reason. Illinois is the most recent to adopt recall (2010), but limits it to the governor and requires bipartisan legislative signatures before a petition can proceed. Virginia is a separate category entirely — rather than a popular vote, it uses a “recall trial” in circuit court, where a judge must find a material adverse effect on the officeholder’s conduct.
Key Distinction
Maryland and New Mexico stand alone as the only two states that offer a veto referendum as their only form of citizen access to the statewide ballot. Their residents can repeal legislative acts but cannot propose new laws or constitutional amendments.
A Note on Local Direct Democracy
This guide covers statewide direct democracy. Many cities, counties, school districts, and other local jurisdictions have their own initiative, referendum, and recall processes, even in states that do not authorize them at the state level. Local rules, thresholds, and subject-matter limits vary enormously by charter and statute and are beyond the scope of this article.
Which States Allow What
Twenty-three states allow citizens to place statutes or constitutional amendments directly before voters, bypassing the legislature entirely. But the landscape is more nuanced than a simple yes-or-no. States vary in which types of measures they permit, what signatures are required, and what subjects are off-limits.
Ballot Measures
Initiative States (Citizen-Initiated Statutes or Amendments)
Veto Referendum States
Recall States
Court-based recall trial (1): Virginia
The Qualification Process
Getting a measure on the ballot is no small feat. In every initiative and referendum state, proponents must collect a specified number of valid voter signatures within a defined time window. The details vary considerably:
- Signature thresholds are usually set as a percentage of votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial or presidential election, commonly ranging from 3 to 15 percent.
- Geographic distribution requirements in some states mandate that signatures come from a minimum number of counties or legislative districts, not just population centers.
- Time limits for collecting signatures typically range from 90 days to two years.
- Single-subject rules in most states require that each measure address only one topic, preventing “logrolling” of unrelated provisions into a single vote.
The process has become increasingly professionalized over the decades. Modern ballot measure campaigns routinely hire professional signature-gathering firms and deploy sophisticated data operations. Major campaigns can spend tens of millions of dollars. California’s 2022 sports betting propositions (Proposition 26 and Proposition 27) together exceeded $500 million in combined spending.
The Indirect Initiative in Action
In 2024, Washington hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood spent roughly $6 million of his own money to place six ballot measures before the legislature through the state’s indirect initiative process. Lawmakers approved three of his proposals in March 2024 (a prohibition on any future state personal income tax, a rollback of restrictions on police vehicle pursuits, and an expansion of parental rights to review educational materials), and they took effect without a public vote. The three remaining measures, repealing the state’s capital gains tax, its cap-and-trade climate law, and an opt-in long-term care program, advanced to November voters and all three failed.
Approval Thresholds
Traditionally, ballot measures require only a simple majority (more than 50 percent of voters) to pass. But a growing number of states have raised the bar, particularly for constitutional amendments.
| State | Threshold | Applies To | Year Adopted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 60% | Constitutional amendments | 2006 |
| Florida | 66.7% | Measures adding or increasing taxes/fees | 2018 |
| Colorado | 55% | Constitutional amendments | 2016 |
| All other states | 50% + 1 | All ballot measures | — |
Threshold battles have become a recurring feature of the direct democracy landscape. The playbook is well-established: a legislature threatened by an upcoming popular initiative, particularly on issues like abortion access or marijuana legalization, places a threshold-increase measure on an earlier, lower-turnout ballot in hopes of raising the bar before the substantive measure reaches voters.
Voters have not been uniformly receptive. South Dakota voters rejected a 60 percent threshold increase in 2022 and then promptly approved a Medicaid expansion measure that legislators opposed. Ohio voters in 2023 overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, which would have raised the state’s threshold to 60 percent. The campaign became, in effect, a de facto preview of the abortion-access measure that followed it on the next ballot.
Threshold fights are only the most visible front in a broader contest. State legislatures have developed an entire toolkit for blunting ballot measures they oppose: making qualification harder before a measure ever reaches voters, manipulating ballot language, and in some cases simply repealing or rewriting voter-approved laws once the legislature reconvenes. The companion to this guide, The Anti-Ballot Measure Playbook, walks through that pushback in detail along with the post-Dobbs reproductive-rights wave that supercharged it.
2026 Elections
So far our database is tracking 72 ballot measures across the 2026 cycle: 61 referred by state legislatures (or in one case, an advisory commission) and 11 citizen-initiated. That citizen-initiated count is preliminary—more measures will qualify as 2026 signature drives close out, and the totals will eventually approach the 30-to-60 citizen-initiated measures we have logged in recent midterm cycles. By comparison, our database shows 140 total measures (30 citizen) in 2022 and 167 (68 citizen) in 2018. As in every recent cycle, legislatively referred amendments will make up the bulk of the count, but the citizen-initiated measures are usually the ones that drive the headlines.
Here are a few contests that stand out for their political stakes, structural significance, or both.
Virginia, Use of Legislative Congressional Redistricting Map Amendment (April 21, 2026). Virginia voters get the year’s first major statewide question on April 21. The legislatively referred amendment would authorize the Virginia General Assembly to draw a new congressional map outside the normal census redistricting cycle, in response to mid-decade redistricting efforts in other states. It is a rare ballot measure that asks voters to weigh in on a procedural question with direct national implications for the U.S. House majority.
Oregon, Veto Referendum on HB 3991 Transportation Tax Increases (May 19, 2026). Oregon’s May 19 special election is the cycle’s clearest example of the people’s veto in action. Citizen organizers gathered enough signatures to refer HB 3991, a 2025 transportation funding package raising the gas tax, payroll tax, and vehicle registration fees, to the ballot before it could take effect. Veto referendums rarely qualify, but Oregon’s relatively low signature threshold and long history of tax-referendum fights make this one of the most-watched non-November votes of the year.
Oklahoma, State Question 832: Minimum Wage Increase (June 16, 2026). Oklahoma voters will decide on June 16 whether to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage from the federal floor of $7.25 to $15 by 2029, with annual cost-of-living adjustments thereafter. The measure qualified as an initiated state statute after a multi-year signature drive. Oklahoma is one of 20 states still tied to the federal minimum wage, and our database shows no prior statewide minimum-wage initiative on Oklahoma’s ballot. SQ 832 is the cycle’s clearest test of whether wage measures still travel to the right of state legislatures, a pattern that has held in nearly every state where minimum-wage initiatives have reached the ballot since 2014.
Nevada, Question 6: Reproductive Rights Amendment (November 3, 2026). Nevada Question 6 is the second of two required votes on a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion. Voters first approved the measure in 2024; under Nevada law, constitutional amendments initiated by citizens must pass in two consecutive general elections to take effect. A second approval would lock the right into the state constitution. The 2024 vote was decisive, but the 2026 vote is the one that matters legally, and it is the only one of the post-Dobbs reproductive-rights measures that requires a second pass.
South Dakota, Constitutional Amendment I: Medicaid Work Requirements (November 3, 2026). South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion in 2022 by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, just months after rejecting a 60 percent supermajority threshold that would have made the expansion mathematically harder to pass. Constitutional Amendment I is the legislature’s response: a referred measure that would amend the state constitution to allow work requirements as a condition of Medicaid coverage. Federal pressure adds to the stakes. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, tightened federal Medicaid match rates and imposed new work-requirement options that shift more of the program’s cost onto states like South Dakota. The 2026 vote is a direct test of whether voters will let the legislature add conditions to a benefit they had approved by initiative just four years earlier, and whether that authority will be used as a release valve for the new federal squeeze on the state budget.
Several other measures will draw attention this cycle, including Missouri Amendment 3 (a referred amendment to repeal the 2024 reproductive-rights measure), Missouri Amendment 4 (a geographic distribution requirement for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments), and South Dakota Constitutional Amendment L (another attempt at a 60 percent threshold for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments). These three are profiled in detail on our companion page, The Anti-Ballot Measure Playbook, alongside the broader history of legislative pushback against direct democracy.