The Anti-Ballot Measure Playbook

In the spring of 2023, Ohio Republican lawmakers did something unusual: they scheduled a statewide special election for August. Ohio had eliminated most August special elections a year earlier, citing low turnout and high costs, then quietly reauthorized one. The single question on the August 8 ballot was Issue 1, a constitutional amendment that would have raised the threshold for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent, expanded the signature distribution requirement to all 88 counties (up from 44), and eliminated the cure period for petitions with correctable errors.

The timing was transparent. A reproductive-rights amendment was already qualifying for the November 2023 ballot, and pre-election polling showed it at roughly 58 percent support, a comfortable majority under the existing rules, but below a 60 percent threshold. Lawmakers placed the threshold measure on August so that, if approved, it would apply to the November abortion vote. Legislative supporters did not bother hiding the strategy. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in private remarks that the measure was “100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

The gambit backfired. Turnout for the August special election reached roughly 39 percent of registered voters, the highest Ohio turnout for a non-general election in years. Voters rejected Issue 1 by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, the exact inverse of the threshold lawmakers had been trying to impose. The no-vote campaign had successfully reframed a procedural question about constitutional amendment thresholds as a referendum on whether voters would let the legislature strip their own power before a specific upcoming vote.

Three months later, Ohio voters approved the November reproductive-rights amendment (confusingly also called Issue 1) by 56.78 percent, adding constitutional protection for abortion access and blocking enforcement of a six-week ban then under injunction. The August vote had served as a dry run for November: the turnout operation, the coalitions, and the framing all carried forward. The Ohio playbook became a cautionary example for legislators in other states. Threshold increases now tend to fail whenever voters recognize them as preemptive strikes against a specific upcoming measure, a lesson already learned in South Dakota in 2022 and learned again, more loudly, in Ohio a year later.

Ohio also provides perhaps the clearest illustration of legislative defiance of voter-approved reform. Voters approved independent redistricting commissions twice, in 2015 and 2018, but lawmakers simply ignored the results and drew their own maps. Voters responded with a third, stronger proposal in 2024, but the measure was narrowly defeated after state officials crafted ballot language widely criticized as misleading. A dissenting state supreme court justice called the official summary “perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.” The saga demonstrates both the power and the limitations of the ballot measure as a reform tool: voters can pass a rule, but they cannot force a legislature to follow it.

Mississippi is the cleanest example in the country of a direct-democracy process being killed not by a legislature, but by a drafting error thirty years old. In 1992, Mississippi voters amended their state constitution to create a citizen initiative process. To ensure geographic balance, the drafters required petition signatures to be collected proportionally from each of the state’s five congressional districts, with no single district contributing more than one-fifth of the total. The number five was baked into the constitutional text.

After the 2000 census, Mississippi lost population and dropped from five congressional districts to four. No one noticed the problem until 2020, when voters overwhelmingly approved Initiative 65, establishing a medical-marijuana program. On the head-to-head choice between the citizen initiative and a competing legislative alternative (Alternative 65A), voters chose Initiative 65 by 73.67 percent to 26.33 percent, the kind of margin that usually ends debate.

Instead, a Mississippi mayor filed suit, arguing that because the state now had only four congressional districts, no initiative could ever satisfy the 1992 constitutional language that divided signatures across five. On May 14, 2021, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in In re Initiative Measure No. 65 that she was right. The court held that the constitutional text was tied to the specific number of congressional districts in place in 1992, that the loss of a district had mathematically broken the provision, and that “absent amendment, it no longer functions.” Initiative 65 was voided, and with it the entire citizen initiative process in Mississippi.

The court’s remedy was straightforward: the legislature could amend the state constitution to fix the distribution requirement. Lawmakers never did. Multiple proposals in subsequent sessions failed over disagreements about scope, signature thresholds, and whether to exclude specific subject matter (abortion and Medicaid expansion were both points of contention). Mississippi is now the only state with a formally-recognized citizen initiative process in its constitution that is legally inoperable in practice. Mississippians retained medical marijuana only because the legislature, recognizing that voters had sent a clear signal, passed a medical cannabis law statutorily in 2022, a statute the legislature can rewrite at will. There is no direct-democracy backstop. The people of Mississippi voted to create an initiative process in 1990, voted to use it in 2020, and watched the process evaporate because of a reference to an administrative unit that no longer existed.

Utah is the long-form illustration of what happens when voters and a legislature disagree about the same question, repeatedly, across multiple election cycles. The fight over who should draw Utah’s legislative maps has now gone through five distinct phases: a ballot measure, a legislative repeal, a state supreme court ruling, a failed constitutional override, and a renewed legislative restriction. At each step, the answer to “who won?” has changed.

Round 1 (2018): Proposition 4, Better Boundaries. Utah voters narrowly approved Proposition 4, an initiative establishing an independent advisory redistricting commission. The margin was razor-thin: 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent, a difference of about 6,000 votes statewide. The measure prohibited partisan gerrymandering and required the legislature to use, or publicly justify ignoring, the commission’s proposed maps.

Round 2 (2020): SB 200. Before the commission ever drew a map, the Utah legislature stepped in. In March 2020, lawmakers passed SB 200, which a compromise narrative described as a “clarification” of Prop 4 but which in practice stripped out the key enforcement mechanisms. The commission became advisory in the weakest sense of the word. When the 2021 redistricting cycle arrived, the legislature drew its own maps and ignored the commission’s proposals entirely. Critics called the resulting congressional map an extreme partisan gerrymander.

Round 3 (2024): League of Women Voters v. Utah State Legislature. On July 11, 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the legislature had overstepped its authority when it gutted Prop 4. The court rested its decision on a clause in the Utah Constitution guaranteeing the people the right to “alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” When lawmakers repealed a citizen initiative aimed at government reform, the court held, they infringed on that constitutional right. The principle was established: a legislature could not simply unwind a voter-approved initiative the moment it became inconvenient.

Round 4 (2024): Amendment D. Utah lawmakers responded within weeks. They called themselves into an emergency special session and placed a constitutional amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would have explicitly authorized the legislature to repeal or rewrite voter-approved measures. To make the measure more palatable, they paired it with a provision banning foreign influence on ballot campaigns, classic ballot candy. The proposed ballot language told voters only that the amendment would “strengthen the initiative process.” Opponents sued. A Utah state court struck the measure from the ballot in September 2024, ruling that the language was “counterfactual” and that lawmakers had also failed to comply with the state’s newspaper-notice requirements. Voters never saw Amendment D.

Round 5 (2025): SB 73. Undeterred, Utah lawmakers returned in the 2025 session with SB 73, a bill that imposes new costs and procedural hurdles on any citizen-initiated measure: publishing full initiative text in a newspaper in every Utah county for two months before the election (an estimated $1.4 million added cost), a mandatory full fiscal analysis paid for by backers, and broader discretion for the lieutenant governor to reject measures on vague grounds. The bill passed and was signed by Governor Spencer Cox. Utah voters have now spent seven years trying to establish one rule, and each victory has produced a more elaborate legislative counter-move.

Missouri’s 2024 ballot was the most consequential single night of direct democracy in the state’s modern history, and it triggered the most elaborate legislative backlash in the country. On November 5, 2024, Missouri voters approved three major measures simultaneously: Amendment 2 (sports betting), Amendment 3 (a constitutional right to reproductive freedom, passing with 52 percent), and Proposition A (a minimum wage increase to $15 and a paid sick leave mandate). On the same ballot, Missouri voters supported Donald Trump for president by a margin of about 18 points.

Amendment 3 made Missouri the first state with an active pre-viability abortion ban to overturn that ban through direct democracy. The state’s trigger ban, which had taken effect the day Dobbs was decided, was now unconstitutional under the state constitution. The campaign to pass Amendment 3 had survived multiple attempts by state officials to keep it off the ballot, including the attorney general’s refusal to sign off on the state auditor’s fiscal estimate, and the secretary of state’s repeated attempts to write partisan ballot summary language. Courts intervened both times.

Proposition A passed by a larger margin than the abortion measure and represented a durable popular consensus on basic labor standards. But unlike Amendment 3, Proposition A was an initiated statute, not a constitutional amendment, meaning the legislature could amend or repeal it with a simple majority. Within months, they did. House Bill 567, passed in spring 2025, repealed the paid sick leave requirement and stripped out the provision indexing the minimum wage to inflation.

The backlash did not stop there. Lawmakers placed a new Amendment 3 on the 2026 ballot to repeal the reproductive-freedom guarantee, pairing the repeal with a ban on gender-transition procedures for minors. They placed an Amendment 4 on the same ballot that would require citizen-initiated constitutional amendments to receive majority approval in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts separately. Proposition A backers are returning with a constitutional version. Missouri 2026 is shaping up as the most crowded ballot-measure fight in the country, and an almost comprehensive demonstration of the anti-ballot-measure playbook from a single legislature in a single cycle.

Arizona Proposition 211, the Voters’ Right to Know Act, is the rare ballot measure that passed with supermajority support, crossed partisan lines, and still ended up in a protracted legal fight. Arizona voters approved Prop 211 in November 2022 with 72 percent of the vote, one of the largest margins for any contested statewide ballot measure that cycle. The measure required anyone making independent expenditures above $50,000 on a statewide campaign, or $25,000 on a local campaign, to disclose the original sources of the money. It was aimed squarely at the practice of wealthy donors routing political contributions through 501(c)(4) nonprofits to hide their identities.

The 72 percent margin suggested genuine bipartisan consensus on disclosure, cutting against the typical framing of campaign-finance reform as a partisan issue. But the measure had been on the ballot only after a roughly decade-long effort. Terry Goddard, former Arizona attorney general and longtime Prop 211 advocate, had eventually built a coalition broad enough to survive a well-funded opposition.

The post-passage fight has been a textbook example of Playbook strategy #4. Republican legislative leaders and the Center for Arizona Policy filed suit almost immediately, arguing that Prop 211 violated free-speech and associational rights under the First Amendment. Two separate cases, one in state court, one in federal court, challenged the law. In September 2025, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that Republican legislative leaders had standing to bring a constitutional challenge, but did not rule on the merits. As of early 2026, the law remains in effect but under active legal threat. The episode demonstrates both the power of direct democracy to enact policies that legislatures will not, and the ongoing ability of the losing side to relitigate the result in court for years after the vote.

Missouri Amendment 3 is the legislative response to the original Amendment 3 voters approved in November 2024. The 2026 version would repeal the constitutional right to reproductive freedom and replace it with a near-total ban, while simultaneously banning gender-transition procedures for minors. The bundling is the strategy: lawmakers know the abortion repeal alone polls poorly, so they have wrapped it inside a separate culture-war provision. The vote will test whether Missouri voters will sort through the package or whether the “ballot candy” tactic can flip a 52 percent pro-abortion-rights majority by adding a second issue in the same question.

Missouri Amendment 4 would require citizen-initiated constitutional amendments to win majority approval not only statewide but in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts separately. Ballotpedia’s analysis of every citizen-initiated constitutional amendment since 2020 found that all of them would have failed under this rule, all of them lost in conservative District 7. Under an extreme scenario, a measure could receive 77 percent statewide and still fail. Amendment 4 is the cleanest demonstration in the country of how a geographic distribution requirement functions in practice as a single-district veto over statewide majorities.

South Dakota voters rejected a 60 percent supermajority threshold for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments in June 2022, then promptly approved Medicaid expansion in November, precisely the kind of measure the threshold would have blocked. Constitutional Amendment L returns to the same well, asking voters to approve a 60 percent threshold for any future citizen-initiated constitutional amendment. The question is whether the lesson Ohio voters absorbed in August 2023, that threshold-raising measures are preemptive strikes against the next ballot, still holds when there is no specific upcoming substantive measure for opponents to point to. Amendment L is the cleanest test in the cycle of whether voters will protect their own constitutional power as a matter of principle.