The Quiet Campaign Against Direct Democracy 

When Missouri Republicans passed a mid-decade congressional map last year designed to eliminate one of the state’s two Democratic congressional districts, citizens responded by doing what the Missouri Constitution has allowed them to do for over a century: They organized a referendum campaign to submit the map to a statewide vote, collecting more than 300,000 signatures in under 90 days. Missouri officials, however, responded with a barrage of extraordinary tactics to stop the referendum from reaching voters.

Several officials preemptively — though unsuccessfully — challenged the referendum’s constitutionality in federal court. The attorney general publicly asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to investigate the signature-gathering effort. The secretary of state accused the campaign of criminal conduct for collecting signatures before his office said the campaign could start, and he prepared an official summary that he later admitted in court was prejudicial and unfair. The secretary also delayed verifying the petition signatures, presumably to ensure that the new map remains in place for the 2026 midterms, regardless of whether voters ultimately approve it.

The Missouri episode is striking, but it is not an outlier. Across states with direct democracy powers, elected officials have increasingly trained their sights on the process itself. Officials have sought to burden the direct democracy process with restrictions that may seem modest in isolation but collectively threaten to render these rights unusable.

The Progressive Era to Dobbs

To understand the backlash from elected officials, it helps to understand the direct democracy powers themselves. About half the states give citizens some form of direct democracy power, whether the right to initiate statutes or constitutional amendments, or to force a popular vote on laws already passed by the legislature.

These powers emerged during the Progressive era as a way to give ordinary citizens more control over their government, though they have ebbed and flowed in use. Recently, interest in the powers has risen as advocates have invoked the tool to advance policies that had stalled in state legislatures — often in states where one party’s control of the legislature locked out policies that nevertheless enjoyed broad public support. These have included minimum wage increases, Medicaid expansion, marijuana legalization, and redistricting reform.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question of abortion rights to the states, accelerated this interest. Between 2022 and 2024, citizens in ten states used the initiative process to propose constitutional protections for abortion access, with voters approving seven. More may be on the ballot this fall.

The Backlash

Coinciding with this renewed interest has been a backlash from the very officials whom citizens have used these powers to circumvent. Rather than attempting to repeal direct democracy powers outright — a move that would likely be politically toxic given broad public support for the powers — officials have instead pursued a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy by burdening virtually every stage of the process with restrictions that are easy to miss individually but collectively threaten to make the powers unusable. According to the Fairness Project, 2025 set a record for proposed legislation that sought to undermine the ballot initiative process, nearly doubling the prior record set just two years earlier, with such measures introduced in 15 states.

That figure does not account for executive branch officials using their limited discretion to impede campaigns. Initiative and referendum campaigns operate under tight deadlines, and state officials are increasingly using pre-approval processes to eat up time — or even run out the clock altogether — before organizers can even get into the field. Ohio illustrates how far this can go. There, state law requires backers to submit a summary of their proposal to the attorney general before they can begin collecting signatures for their main petition. But, as a federal appeals court found in 2025, the attorney general has used this process to unconstitutionally “exercise editorial control” over petitions, rejecting the summary for a proposed amendment to end qualified immunity eight times over four years. Courts have also rebuked state officials in Arkansas, Missouri, and Montana for similar gatekeeping tactics. And initiative supporters in Oklahoma are challenging a similar requirement before the state supreme court, alleging that it gives the secretary of state an effective veto power over the people’s right of initiative.

States have also erected new hurdles at the petition stage that shrink the pool of people able to circulate petitions and drive up the costs of doing so. Florida offers a stark example. Following reports that the state sent law enforcement to people’s homes to ask if they had signed an initiative petition for abortion rights, the legislature passed sweeping new restrictions in 2025. The law bans non-Floridians from circulating petitions, makes it a third-degree felony for Floridians to collect more than 25 signatures without first registering with the state and completing a state-run training program, and imposes a $50,000 fine for each ineligible or unregistered circulator, among a range of other filing, validation, and cost requirements. A federal district court recently upheld much of the law, but the plaintiffs have appealed.

Other states have pursued comparable restrictions. Arkansas, for instance, has enacted a similarly broad set of restrictions on circulators and an increased signature requirement that are the subject of pending litigation in federal and state courts. Meanwhile, state courts in Arizona, Michigan, and Ohio have split on the enforceability of other circulator restrictions.

For measures that make the ballot, officials have worked to prejudice voters against the proposal through controls over the descriptions on the ballot. By 2023, observers were already flagging the manipulation of ballot language as an emerging tactic, pointing to disputes in Arkansas, Idaho, Missouri, and Ohio. The tactic has only intensified. In Ohio in 2024, a state board chaired by the secretary of state described a proposed constitutional amendment designed in part to prevent partisan gerrymandering as actually “requiring” gerrymandering — language voters said was confusing. The Montana Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against the state attorney general’s attempts to write one-sided summaries. In Missouri, courts have ordered the secretary of state to rewrite unfair or misleading ballot language five times in the past year and a half.

Even measures that survive the gauntlet and win voter approval are not safe from official interference. In some cases, officials have simply refused to act, delaying implementation of measures voters have already approved. That happened with Medicaid expansion initiatives in Maine and Missouri, leading to litigation that eventually forced the states to implement the measures. In other cases, officials have been more aggressive, moving to gut or even repeal voter-approved measures. That recently happened to voter-approved minimum wage increase and paid sick leave laws in Nebraska, a paid sick leave law in Missouri, a marijuana legalization initiative in Ohio, and a redistricting reform initiative in Utah. The Utah Supreme Court, at least, found the repeal unconstitutional, though the Utah Legislature has since retaliated against the justices.

Any single one of these restrictions might not seem so burdensome, but taken together, they amount to a concerted effort to make the process so expensive, time-consuming, and legally fraught that only the best-funded and most well-organized campaigns can hope to survive it.

Constitutional Guardrails

The extent to which elected officials can erect hurdles like these is hotly contested in courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the kinds of political conversation and exchange of ideas inherent in ballot measure campaigns, including the act of circulating a petition. At the same time, because the Constitution does not require states to provide direct democracy powers in the first place, the Court has said that states retain “considerable leeway to protect the integrity and reliability of the initiative process, ” leaving courts to navigate the tension between those principles.

How that tension gets resolved varies, but the ongoing federal litigation over the sweeping set of Florida restrictions shows how high the stakes can be. In an April 2026 decision, the district court acknowledged that the restrictions had left the state’s initiative power “virtually dead save for the most controversial issues for which tens of millions of dollars can be raised” — yet still declined to block them. The court reasoned that such consequences amounted to “policy arguments” for the legislature, “not constitutional violations for which this Court may grant relief.”

State constitutions, meanwhile, may offer more protections for direct democracy powers. These documents typically set forth the basic procedures citizens must follow, implicitly limiting the ability of legislatures to impose tougher requirements. Still, many state legislatures have asked voters — often unsuccessfully — to amend their constitutions to make these powers harder for citizens to use. For example, in addition to the potential redistricting referendum this fall, Missourians will vote in August on a legislative proposal to increase the voter approval threshold for future ballot measures by requiring majority approval in each of the state’s congressional districts instead of just majority approval statewide. And courts have generally interpreted state constitutions as permitting lawmakers to fill procedural gaps in the initiative and referendum process not specifically addressed by the documents, but not to use that authority to limit, restrict, or otherwise interfere with citizens’ exercise of these powers. Where exactly that line falls between permissible and impermissible regulations is the subject of much litigation.

In a fitting twist, citizens in some states have begun using their direct democracy powers to protect those very powers from official interference. Citizen-led initiative efforts to shield their direct democracy powers have previously succeeded in states like Arizona and Oregon, and similar efforts have recently been announced in Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Montana. Whether those campaigns can navigate the gauntlet this piece has described, however, remains to be seen.

Derek Clinger is a senior counsel for the State Democracy Research Initiative at University of Wisconsin Law School.

Suggested Citation: Derek Clinger, The Quiet Campaign Against Direct Democracy, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (July 13, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/quiet-campaign-against-direct-democracy