These Are the Ballot Measures We’re Watching Today
Voters across the country will directly vote on issues including abortion rights, paid leave, and gerrymandering.
By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union
It’s not Trump and Harris on your ballot this year.
In addition to nearly three dozen Senate races, all 435 House seats, and thousands of state and local offices, there are a slew of amendments, ballot measures, and referendum votes taking place across the country. Many of those votes will have a demonstrable impact on conditions for working people and families, regardless of whether they live in blue, red, or purple states.
Here’s some of what’s on the ballot this year.
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Paid leave and minimum wage
Alaskans are voting on a referendum Tuesday that would, in one shot, raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2027, guarantee at least a week of paid sick leave, and ban mandatory “captive audience” meetings that employers use to crush unionization efforts.
We recently went to Alaska and spoke with people from across the political spectrum about the ballot measure, which polling suggests has broad polling in the state.
Way down in Missouri, voters are similarly deciding on Proposition A, which would both require paid sick leave and raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Despite trending to the right over the past decade, Missouri voters notably repealed a state right-to-work law through a ballot measure in 2018. Nebraskans are also voting on paid sick leave, while Californians could soon have the strongest minimum wage in the country at $18 per hour by the end of 2025.
Arizona, meanwhile, could go backward by handing a pay cut to restaurant servers and other tip-dependent workers. Currently, state law says tipped workers must make up to $3 below the state minimum wage of $14.35 an hour; Proposition 138, however, would change the tipped wage to 25 percent less than the minimum wage, effectively bringing the tipped wage from $11.35 to $10.73.
Unpaid prison labor
Both California and Nevada could join a growing wave of states to close the 13th Amendment loophole by banning forced prison labor.
Proposition 6 in California and Question 4 in Nevada would implement constitutional protections against involuntary servitude and allow incarcerated people more time to take part in rehabilitation programs. Many California inmates are paid less than $.74 an hour; inmate firefighters in California are paid as little as $6 per day.
Money in politics
Maine voters are poised to greatly restrict dark money in politics, a concept that seems to enjoy broad support everywhere but Washington.
During an election where super PACs have spent more than $2.6 billion in support or opposition to political candidates, the Maine measure would set a $5,000 limit on such dark money spending. And those proponents have already planned on what sort of argument they’d make.
“The argument is not that we're trying to suppress the amount of money in politics,” Lawrence Lessig, a former presidential candidate and a Harvard Law School professor, told More Perfect Union earlier this year. “We're trying to avoid raising money in a way that creates the risk of quid pro quo corruption.”
Gerrymandering
After high-profile wins for nonpartisan redistricting in states like Michigan, Ohio voters could implement a bipartisan commission to implement redistricting, thereby ending the oft-utilized practice of gerrymandering congressional and legislative districts in the Buckeye State. As a result, Republicans have cemented their majorities in the legislature and Congress.
But the language for the amendment, written by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, is needlessly confusing and laden with misleading information; the explanation says a “yes” vote for the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and that the commission will be “required to gerrymander…to favor either of the two largest political parties.”
As one voter told Bolts Magazine: “I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else.” Despite the confusion, a recent poll showed that even one-third of GOP voters support the measure.
Watch our 2021 video on how Ohio’s gerrymander works:
Public funds for private schools
In the last two years, the conservative Nebraska legislature has passed “school voucher” laws that take taxpayer dollars out of public schools and into private institutions with little to no accountability — even though the state constitution explicitly bans doing this. These laws have defunded public schools and blown up budgets in other states.
But in Nebraska, voters have the ability to repeal state law through a process known as veto referendums. And both times, a coalition of public school advocates succeeded in getting the issue on the ballot — and now have a chance to be the first state in the country to repeal a school voucher law. We went to Nebraska to talk to teachers, parents, and lawmakers about it earlier this year.
In addition to Nebraska, voters in Kentucky (Amendment 2) and Colorado (Amendment 80) are deciding on similar measures; the latter would enshrine “school choice” as a constitutional right.
Reproductive rights
Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters in 10 states will cast a ballot for or against abortion rights, including red (Florida, Missouri) and purple (Nevada, Arizona) states.
The surge of energy that came in the wake of the Dobbs decision continued this year, as abortion rights groups vastly outspent opponents of the ballot measures. But while abortion rights have won at the ballot box repeatedly over the past two years, this year’s measures face new challenges, including higher thresholds for passage; guaranteeing the right to an abortion in the Florida constitution, for example, will require 60 percent approval of Amendment 4, and Colorado requires 55 percent.
Abortion is currently fully banned in Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota, while Nebraska and Arizona ban abortion after 12 and 15 weeks, respectively. Voters have the chance to expand abortion access in all of these states today.