Tag Archives: Ballot Initiatives

“Californians turn down minimum-wage increase”

Politico

“The defeat of an initiative to raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour makes California the first state to reject a statewide minimum-wage increase at the ballot in almost 30 years, an outcome likely to reverberate across organized labor nationally.”

But it might be a mistake to over-read its implications:

“In the past half-decade, California service unions have effectively plotted to raise minimum-wage standards by industry and location, setting a patchwork of wage floors that rendered the $18 initiative obsolete for much of the state’s low-paid workforce.”

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“Ranked Choice Voting: What Happened & What’s Next”

Michael Parsons (FairVote, Senior Legal Fellow) and  Meredith Sumpter (FairVote CEO) offer reflections at Democracy Takes on what the results of the 2024 ballot initiatives tell us about the future of rank-choice voting as a reform. A peek here:

“In 2016, only two million Americans lived in the 10 cities using RCV. As of today, that number has grown to nearly 17 million Americans in over 50 cities, counties, and states. The number has grown because the reform works, giving voters greater say and incentivizing elected officials to get things done for their constituents. 

On Election Day, the number grew yet again, but we also fell far short of what we had hoped . . . . As might be expected, some long-standing critics of RCV have seized on the state-level losses and are offering a typical post-election analysis: “Why the results prove I was right all along.”

But there’s a difference between hot takes and hard work. And it’s difficult to imagine any major election reform that would have sailed to victory this year. There were numerous election reforms on the ballot in addition to ranked choice voting – including independent redistricting commissions and open primaries. All have won statewide victories in recent years. This cycle, all of them failed at the statewide level.”

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“‘We Have a Right to Put It on the Ballot’: How Organizers Are Defending Direct Democracy”

Bolts Magazine. I see this story as relevant to a basic question that I think is going to confront the field of election law (and, more broadly, the law of democratic procedures) over the next decade or so: the extent to which decisions should be made on the basis of majority rule. Watching the fight over Issue 1 unfold in Ohio, I became convinced of the importance of preserving the right of the citizenry to control the machinery of their self-government by means of a majority vote. I recognize that there have been arguments in favor of a supermajority requirement for constitutional change, but on balance I think the risk of “minority rule” through a supermajority requirement is greater than the risk of an oppressive majority. Certainly, it would have been a serious problem for self-government in Ohio if Issue 1 had prevailed in raising the threshold for constitutional change to 60%. That would have made it extremely difficult to adopt new anti-gerrymandering reform, for example, to redress the way that incumbent politicians managed to negate the efficacy of the previous anti-gerrymandering reforms in the state during the last decade.

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“How South Dakota Voters Won a Power Struggle With G.O.P. Legislators”

Blake Hounshell wrote this piece for the NY Times. From the article:

“Coming on the same night that voters in San Francisco ousted their lightning rod of a district attorney, Chesa Boudin — in what was widely interpreted as a setback for progressive ideas on criminal justice — it would have been easy to overlook what happened on Tuesday in South Dakota.

But the results there are no less consequential for national politics. 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.”

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