Citizen-driven ballot initiatives are a powerful tool in the fight against abortion bans like the one threatening Arizona. State governments can’t be trusted to execute the popular will. We’ll have to do it ourselves.

From Jacobin

The AAA initiative is an example of a citizen-driven ballot initiative, a method by which ordinary citizens choose an important issue and propose a law to confront it. With enough public support, measured by signatures gathered on a verified petition, the initiative can go to a popular vote. This process, in which the people both propose and vote on the laws that govern them, is one of the only existing forms of direct democracy in the United States today.

Because citizen-driven ballot initiatives are a powerful means of enacting direct democracy, state governments across the country are cracking down on the process to prevent popular will from contradicting their own governance.

Despite the fact that a majority of American adults believe that abortion access should be legal to some degree, state governments continue to act against that sentiment. In Arizona, legislators are trying to kneecap the proposed AAA Act, should it make it onto the ballot. One of the strategies used to challenge the power of citizen-driven initiatives is to propose intentionally confusing counterinitiatives to dupe voters.

In other states, the power of the ballot initiative to reflect popular sentiment on abortions has been proven. For example, in both 2006 and 2008, South Dakotans voted against two different ballot initiatives that would have banned or severely limited abortion access. In August of 2022, voters in Kansas shot down a legislatively proposed amendment that would have enabled the government to restrict or ban access to abortion for citizens of the state. Also in 2022, Kentucky voters rejected a ballot measure that sought to deny constitutional protections for abortion care.

In each of these instances, citizens chose to preserve their reproductive health care rights rather than simply relying on the dubious idea that the government will consistently act in the people’s interests. These actions — all aimed at solidifying the power of choice and undertaken by citizens across red, blue, and purple states alike — give me hope for current campaigns like the one in Arizona.

Reproductive freedom campaigns are currently underway in various stages in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, with initiatives that could all make it to the ballot in 2024.

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