U.S. News & World Report: State Lawmakers Fight Citizen Initiatives
U.S. News & World Report: State Lawmakers Fight Citizen Initiatives
For the past two years, Florida’s dominant Republican politicians have been erecting barriers to citizen initiatives, direct actions that shape public policy and constitutional amendments. These populist campaigns have, for example, given ex-convicts the right to vote and put a cap on certain tax assessments. Republicans and their allies oppose them on the basis that they clutter up the Florida Constitution unnecessarily.
There were already plenty of built-in challenges to the citizen initiative process.
For starters, sponsors must canvass for hundreds of thousands of signatures to fill petitions from every corner of the state. Then the Florida Supreme Court determines whether the proposal’s language is targeted and clear. If it passes that test, the proposal lands on the next general election ballot. A supermajority, 60% of voters, must approve it.
“There are many, many hurdles in terms of getting anything passed,” says Anjenys Gonzalez-Eilert, Florida executive director of Common Cause, the nonpartisan democracy watchdog. “Florida ballots can have pages and pages and pages. Sometimes people get voter exhaustion,” she says.
“Often the language is designed to mislead: It means the opposite of what it says. In the best case, once it’s on the ballot, you have to get voters to read it, understand it and be willing to cast a vote for it,” Gonzalez-Eilert says. …
Last year, legislators made initiative campaigns more expensive by mandating hourly pay for signature gatherers. Canvassers had been paid by the signature.
This session legislators are trying again to burden the process. Bills under active consideration would greatly increase the number of required petition signatures and add other new regulations.
Those bills threaten to “gut” the system, says Patricia Brigham, president of the Florida League of Women Voters. “It’s voter suppression,” she says.
Gonzalez-Eilert agrees. “If you’re trying to silence the community from voting on the issues that matter to them, you’re putting up unnecessary hurdles to what end?”
“What are they trying to accomplish?” she asks. “This is a solution in search of a problem.” …
The “pass it twice” proposal’s sponsor is a political committee funded by a nonprofit with the same name, Keep Our Constitution Clean (KOCC). The directors are Fort Lauderdale lawyers Jason Haber and Jason Blank and Miami lawyer Matthew Meyers. Haber and Blank have a civil law firm that lists ballot initiatives as a practice area and unidentified elected officials as clients, according to the Haber Blank website.
Brigham of the League of Women Voters calls the KOCC proposal “an outrageous, deliberate attempt to confuse the voters.”
“This could be devastating,” Gonzalez-Eilert says. “We don’t have to elect our president twice, we don’t have to elect our senator twice. What do we have to elect twice?”
“It will make voters second-guess themselves,” she says. “If it’s on the ballot twice, they’ll think, maybe it’s not such a great thing.”
As for KOCC, “We don’t know who’s running this and why. Why not tell us who you are, what are you afraid of? If this is such a good thing, then tell us – but they don’t,” Gonzalez-Eilert says. …
Over the past two and a half years, hundreds of anti-initiative bills have been introduced in 27 states, and since 2016 a dozen states have passed legislation making it harder to put citizen-generated measures on the ballot, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
Florida’s backlash followed the 2018 passage of Amendment 4, which restores voting rights to former convicts. The debate continues with an ongoing legal challenge to financial requirements for voting that activists liken to a discriminatory “poll tax.”
Fearing the new voters would favor Democrats, Republican legislators added a fines and fees payment caveat to sabotage the amendment, the activists charge.
Hutson denies legislators harbor any ulterior motives. Gonzalez-Eilert says they’re making systemic changes to preserve their power.
“The fact that Amendment 4 was overwhelmingly supported by Floridians let them know that Floridians have an interest in the way they’re being governed,” she says. “Citizens don’t want to have their voices silenced, they want to participate. If you want to be the sole source of power, that would rub you the wrong way.”