'It’s a killer. We’re done': Covid-19 puts ballot initiatives in peril
March was supposed to be a big month for James Hayes.
He and other organizers with Ohioans for Raising the Wage have been campaigning to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage – currently $8.70 an hour – to $13. The organizers planned to be stationed at the polls throughout the state during the primary election to get voters , already in a civic mindset, to sign petitions to help them get the measure on the ballot. They need to gather 442,958 signatures by 1 July to make that happen.
But the Covid-19 pandemic waylaid the campaign. Ohio essentially canceled in-person voting for its primary, now at the end of April. Organizers have stopped collecting signatures to comply with state orders to avoid public contact – a strategy that these campaigns traditionally heavily rely on.
“Every day we lose … the amount of volunteer hours and the resources goes up as well. It’s really difficult,” Hayes said. “It’s heart-wrenching.” Hayes and his group filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to extend the deadline for collecting signatures.
Ballot measures are a critical way of allowing activists to bypass partisan legislatures and allow voters to directly enact policies, something currently allowed in some form in more than two dozen states. They can be extremely expensive and take considerable organizing work to succeed.
In recent years these efforts have been used to achieve sweeping expansions of democracy in the country, including repealing Florida’s lifetime ban on felon voting, expanding Medicaid, and creating an independent redistricting commission in Michigan. The initiatives have been so successful that Republicans in several states have tried to gut them or make it harder to get referendums on the ballot.
Now, those efforts could be in peril as organizers face fast-approaching deadlines to gather tens of thousands, in many cases hundreds of thousands, of signatures. If social isolation measures persist, and lawmakers don’t ease restrictions, these measures won’t be on the ballot in November, leaving voters without a chance to vote on crucial reforms like expanding voting, LGBTQ rights and limiting gerrymandering.
Though state lawmakers are scrambling to find alternatives for people to vote in upcoming elections, there has been no parallel effort to make it easier for organizers to get measures on the ballot for November.
While organizers in Ohio could try again next year, that’s not an option for Andy Moore, the director of People Not Politicians, who is based in Oklahoma. After the governor declared a state of emergency there, the secretary of state paused all signature collection efforts.
People Not Politicians needs 177,958 signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would strip Oklahoma lawmakers of their ability to draw electoral districts and instead give it to an independent
commission evenly divided between Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Because redistricting takes place once every 10 years, and the next round is early next year, this is the last chance to reform the process for the next decade.
“It’s a free pass to politicians to gerrymander yet again,” said Moore, whose group is still awaiting final approval to collect signatures. Once the measure is approved, they will have 90 days to collect the signatures. The effort has already had to cancel house parties and a planned 5K run in the shape of a gerrymandered district.
“We don’t have the luxury of waiting until next year,” said George Shelton, who is leading a similar anti-gerrymandering effort in Arkansas. Unable to work towards the 89,151 signatures they need to make the ballot, organizers are educating people online about what they can do to fix gerrymandering. Shelton and organizers have until 3 July.
Organizers are considering different options to combat this epic hurdle. They’re looking for new ways to get people to sign petitions, and posing legal challenges seeking to force state officials to extend the deadline or lower the number of signatures they need to get, said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a group that works on progressive ballot initiatives.
Moore also said officials should allow activists to gather signatures online. But that’s currently not allowed in any state, said Amanda Zoch, who works on elections at the National Conference of State Legislatures. States have long required in-person, handwritten signatures for ballot signatures and tightly regulate who can collect them.
A handful of efforts to allow voters to submit electronic signatures for referendums failed in recent years. In California, one of the referendums stalled by Covid-19 is an effort to create a law to allow organizers to collect signatures for future referendums electronically.
“It’s a killer. We’re done,” said Michael Liddell, who organized the effort. “There’s no point in even turning anything in. We’re not going to make it.”
Some activists, he said, are requesting that California officials grant referendum organizers an extension to turn in signatures and let them collect signatures online.
In Arizona, candidates can gather signatures online to qualify for the ballot, but organizers must still collect signatures in person to make a referendum appear on it. Activists filed lawsuits in both state and federal court in recent weeks to be allowed to collect signatures online. Republicans in the state are opposing that request, citing the potential for fraud.
Some organizations are still forging ahead amid the Covid-19 outbreak. In Maine, Republicans have set up drive-thru events with single-use pens to gather more than 63,000 signatures to block the state from using ranked choice voting in the presidential election. In Michigan, organizers supporting a referendum to expand LGBTQ protections are allowing people to request petitions online that are then mailed to them to sign. Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert, a Republican, issued an executive order allowing organizers to distribute petitions electronically, but is still requiring Utah voters to sign them by hand and mail them in.
But those efforts may be not be enough. Gathering enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot, even when there isn’t a pandemic, requires herculean levels of organizing and funding. Moore said he gave up a fulltime job at the University of Oklahoma running its infectious disease clinic (the irony is not lost on him, he said) to do this work.
“At this point, with this epidemic, I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen,” he said.