ICYMI: Kelly Hall Calls Out Oklahoma Legislature’s ‘Cowardly Approach’ to Undermining Direct Democracy
Fairness Project Executive Director Joins PBS to Discuss Ongoing Threats to Ballot Measures
Washington, DC – Kelly Hall, the Executive Director of Fairness Project, appeared on The Oklahoma News Report, an OETA PBS program, to condemn legislation moving through the Oklahoma legislature that could block citizen-led campaigns from placing questions on the ballot through Oklahoma’s referendum process.
Resolutions to make it more difficult for state questions to be voted on have already passed the state House of Representatives, including House Joint Resolution 1059, which would require constitutional amendments to receive over 55% of the vote instead of a simple majority, and would make the state auditor responsible for determining projected costs of state questions.
“This is death by a thousand cuts for the ballot measure process, making it harder to qualify by collecting signatures, making it impossible to get through the bureaucratic steps, making it harder to win on Election Day. All of these things add up to simply invalidating the initiative process without explicitly telling voters. It is a cowardly approach to wanting to undo the ballot measure process. Instead, they are going at it bite by bite, bit by bit,” said Kelly Hall, Executive Director of Fairness Project.
Since 2016, voters through citizen-led initiatives have expanded Medicaid to more than 200,000 low-income Oklahomans, changed several drug and non-violent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and made Oklahoma one of the nation’s largest and most accessible medical marijuana markets.
Attacks like this are exactly why Fairness Project launched the Ballot Measure Rescue Campaign to defend direct democracy across the country.