Madison Willis/Rapid City Journal via AP
Voters head to the polls at Valley View Elementary School on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, 2024, in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Just about the only way to achieve any policy in the public interest in red states is through the legacy practice of ballot initiatives. But as I wrote last year, Republicans who don’t like what their populations tell them at the ballot box have been waging a war to weaken or nullify the practice altogether. And conservatives seeking to maintain their lock on state power are continuing to show contempt for their voters in 2025. But the voters are fighting back.
At the beginning of South Dakota’s short legislative year, which runs from January to March, state lawmakers voted to add the most extreme geographic requirement in the country, which would make it incredibly difficult to qualify constitutional amendments.
The plan would have forced canvassers to collect signatures in each of the state’s 35 senatorial districts. The number of signatures would have to equal 5 percent of that senatorial district’s votes for governor in the last gubernatorial election. Those signatures would be collected in addition to signatures collected statewide totaling 10 percent of the votes for governor cast in the last gubernatorial election. Arkansas has a similar convoluted requirement, but this one is worse.
If just one Senate district failed to get enough signatures to meet the threshold, a constitutional amendment would fail, even if it exceeded both the statewide and district thresholds everywhere else. To complicate matters further, the secretary of state of South Dakota tallies election results by precincts, not districts, so it was anyone’s guess how the secretary would do the counting.
South Dakota Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 2-to-1, but that doesn’t mean that conservative voters won’t vote for progressive initiatives. So once voters passed heresies like Medicaid expansion in 2022 and medical marijuana in 2020, the initiative became anathema for the legislature’s far-right conservative faction, who saw their cherished goal of maintaining a permanent Republican majority devoted to the most conservative policies eroding.
“You see more legislatures in rural Western states that were traditionally Republican become very one-sided Republican,” says Matthew Schweich, president of the Voter Defense Association of South Dakota, which produced a stinging report on the proposal. “One-party control unleashes anti-initiative ideas that might otherwise be moderated in a more balanced political system.” Voters in Idaho and Utah also must contend with disgruntled legislators aiming for curbs on their initiative powers.
But regardless of party affiliation, possible restrictions on the initiative process do not sit well with voters in the first state in America to pioneer ballot initiatives. They see them as the only way to plow through resistant legislative committees and permanent supermajorities, to get important issues up for wider consideration.
Republicans who don’t like what their populations tell them at the ballot box have been waging a war to weaken or nullify the use of ballot initiatives.
After hearing from outraged voters, South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden got the message. Even though he thought the bill was a “worthy goal,” he also surmised that it wouldn’t stand up to an inevitable court challenge, and he vetoed it. Last Monday, in the final meeting of the 2025 session, the members of the state House voted to overturn the decision, but the state Senate sustained the governor’s veto.
The victory was a stop-and-breathe moment for state voting rights advocates, but it won’t be the last battle in the assault on direct democracy. But Rhoden may have let the geographic requirement go because he had another option already in place.
In his veto letter, the governor expressed support for a constitutional amendment already set for the 2026 election cycle that would, if enacted, raise the threshold for passage of constitutional amendments to 60 percent. Florida has the same threshold, which helped defeat an abortion amendment and recreational marijuana last November. If the 60 percent threshold had been in place in 2022, Medicaid expansion, which passed with 56 percent of the vote, would have failed. Plus, South Dakota voters had already rejected a higher threshold, 55 percent, in 2018.
“Ten or 20 years ago in South Dakota there were norms: respect the initiative process and leave it be,” says Schweich. “The good news is that voters are not eager to get rid of their initiative rights. Opponents of the initiative process would rather stop these ballot initiatives in the first place rather than fight them post-enactment because that’s even more politically unpopular.”
The “geographic distribution requirement” is not dead yet either. It could reappear during the 2026 legislative session with different restrictions; for example, requiring 5 percent in some, but not all Senate districts. Schweich argues that if there’s no geographic requirement to pass a constitutional amendment, which is the more consequential decision, why should there be one for getting it on the ballot?
ABOUT 1,400 MILES DUE SOUTH OF PIERRE, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, another Republican governor, Jeff Landry, grappled with another bumptious electorate over four legislatively initiated constitutional amendments, the only statewide measures on the ballot in a March 29 election dotted with municipal contests.
Compared to South Dakota, the constitutional amendment landscape in Louisiana is a minefield. The constitutional amendments that Pelican State lawmakers send to voters would be passed as statutes elsewhere. “The Louisiana Constitution is notoriously lengthy and just riddled with amendments,” says Brian Brox, an associate professor of political science at Tulane University. “Something comes up and lawmakers want to pass a bill, but it’s constitutionally protected, so they have to amend [the state constitution] to make the normal legislative process possible.”
Lists of amendments delivered to voters with complex “explainers” are a feature, not a bug, of Louisiana elections. The summaries of the four amendments provided by the secretary of state did not offer plain-English information about the purpose of the amendments; links to the bills do not help laymen unaccustomed to reading legislative proposals.
Two of the measures dealt with state courts: One would have established new regional and statewide specialized courts and given the state Supreme Court the power to discipline out-of-state lawyers cited for unethical conduct. The second would have created new timetables for judicial special elections.
The most controversial measures involved crime and taxes, two running concerns in the state: Amendment 3 would have increased the number of crimes for which juvenile offenders could be tried as adults, while also making it easier to prosecute individuals younger than 17 as adults. Amendment 2 aimed to rewire the state tax code to reduce the maximum income tax rate, increase deductions for senior citizens, and change other local and state tax measures and modify various state funds.
Gung ho to get one of his signature measures passed, Landry barnstormed across the state, touting Amendment 2 as a critical tool to improve Louisiana’s economic competitiveness. His advocacy, even when combined with support from rapper 50 Cent and Donald Trump Jr., did not move voters on the tax amendment.
Opponents from conservative religious groups on the right to social and criminal justice advocates on the left, however, zeroed in on those two measures: harmful in the case of juvenile prosecutions or impenetrable when it came to taxes: A 91-word summary of Amendment 2 contained a link to a 115-page bill.
All four amendments finally ended up being lumped together and slammed with the slogan “No on All.” They nose-dived by supermajorities of 64 percent or more statewide, and encountered significant opposition in both Democratic and Republican strongholds.
By most accounts, Landry won’t suffer any lasting political damage. He melted down though, blaming billionaire George Soros, far-left activists, and Louisiana voters themselves for the defeat. “We realize how hard positive change can be to implement, he said, “in a State that is conditioned for failure.”
Like Rhoden and South Dakota lawmakers, defeat doesn’t mean that Landry and Louisiana legislators view it as a plea for better governance from voters fed up with do-nothing representatives. It’s merely a signal to achieve the same goals by more palatable means. With the regular Louisiana legislative session in the offing in the next couple of weeks, legislators may reintroduce some of the proposals that voters just defeated.
They also could play the waiting game and bring the amendments to the ballot in 2028, when the next presidential election delivers a more polarized electorate. “Because these amendments were proposed and supported by the more conservative Republican leaders in the state, and it’s perhaps a bit troubling to them that even some of the conservative areas voted no,” says Brox. “People are still unsatisfied with how things are working,” he adds, “and those feelings of dissatisfaction got taken out on these four amendments, where they felt like the government was trying to push some amendments that were not really well explained.”
The problem for voters juggling jobs, families, and other stresses is that their elected representatives shield their true intensions in ponderous bills, legal minutiae, and obscure mathematical formulas and nudge voters into eviscerating the very ballot initiative processes that have delivered a semblance of progress. The fear is that when voters finally want to use the ballot initiative process themselves, it will no longer exist.
