Why is it so tough to get reforms on the ballot?

If we had a better legislature, we wouldn’t need to work so hard to get citizen initiatives on the ballot. But here we are. And now another one of these representing a critical reform has failed to get enough signatures that the courts rule to be valid.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the Protect Education ballot initiative, intended to place guardrails on the voucher program, had failed to gather enough valid signatures. The dispute brought before the Court had to do with the procedures used to invalidate signatures due to duplicates. While there are reasonable arguments to be made that the Court’s decision was incorrect, that is not the topic of this piece.

Rather, I’m asking, why are so many signatures needed for a citizen initiative to be put on the ballot in the first place?

What does it take to get something on an Arizona ballot?

For the legislature to refer a measure to the ballot, it only needs 47 people to agree: at least 31 in the AZ House, and 16 in the AZ Senate. Of course, each of those legislators represent a lot of people. But the small numbers required means that the party with the majority can often put something on the ballot easily.

For a citizen effort to put a statutory law on the ballot in Arizona, valid signatures from 10% of the qualified electors are required; in practice this might require as much as a raw percentage of 15% or more, given duplicate signatures and other errors. For a constitutional amendment, the legal requirement is 15%, which in practice might require over 20% prior to validation. In practice, that might be over half a million signatures.

Are Arizona’s signature requirements unusual?

Is that a particularly high number? Consider some other states. In California, for instance, a measure to add a statute only requires 5% of qualified voters. Some (of the “don’t California my Arizona” persuasion) might say, “who cares about that?” But what about extremely red South Dakota? It also only requires 5%. Similarly for Missouri and Montana; and 6% for Idaho.

To be sure, there are many states that have no statewide citizen initiatives at all: for instance, both Texas and Hawaii don’t have this option. But for the states that do (34 of them for at least some kinds of laws), Arizona has the second most stringent requirements. Only Wyoming is worse – it doesn’t permit citizen-sourced constitutional amendments and requires 15% of qualified electors for a statutory measure to make it to the ballot. 

And if we look at Switzerland, a country that relies heavily on direct democracy, only about .9% of the electorate is required to put a desired Federal statute on the ballot. That country has a population only slightly larger than Arizona’s. And in case you wondered, it’s not a particularly Socialist country (though, like nearly all developed countries, they have a more generous social safety net than we do).

Arizona’s signature requirements make it almost impossibly difficult for a citizen’s movement to put something on the ballot. 

A better legislature AND a better backstop for direct democracy

Citizens in a democracy must be able to influence their own laws. As a practical matter, most detailed changes need to be done by representatives; and in this coming election, we need to elect legislators who will support public education and place some sensible guardrails on the out-of-control voucher system. But we currently lack such a legislature, and may again be in that position in the future, even if we do better this year. We need to have a a more direct form of democracy as a backup. And this backup needs to actually function.

Current barriers to citizen input are anti-democratic. They need to go. As do the legislators who create the barriers.