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Anti-democratic legislation aims to strip voters’ rights to ballot measures, equal representation, nonpartisan courts

Washington, D.C. – Legislators in states across the country are rushing in the opening days of the 2026 legislative session to attack some of their own voters’ most fundamental rights, including their rights to equal representation and access to the ballot measure process. That’s according to the Fairness Project, the national leader in ballot measures.

Already this year, legislators have introduced over 40 draft constitutional amendments to restrict voters’ access to the ballot and dozens of bills to undermine the ballot measure process. If passed into law, those bills would create myriad obstacles for ballot measures, from giving politicians even more power over ballot language to creating byzantine regulations on signature gathering. 

“Democracy is under a sustained assault everywhere, not just from the current administration in Washington, but in statehouses across the country,” said Kelly Hall, Executive Director of the Fairness Project. “While most Americans are rightfully focused on the horrors being committed by the federal government, their state governments are seizing this moment to attack their rights closer to home.”

Attacks on direct democracy by state legislators doubled last year alone, according to analysis by the Fairness Project. That’s when the Fairness Project sounded the alarm over legislators in more than 15 states introducing over 100 bills attacking the ballot measure process in an attempt to prevent voters from expressing their will at the ballot box. The organization subsequently released a report, Direct Democracy Under Assault, documenting legislators’ multi-pronged attack on ballot measures and direct democracy writ large. 

This session, legislators are redoubling their efforts to obstruct the path for citizens-initiated ballot measures to make it on the ballot. These include proposed rules that would allow politicians to control how measures would be worded and appear on the ballot. Others create procedural hurdles designed to make the ballot measure process cost prohibitive for citizen-powered campaigns. Meanwhile, other legislators have proposed novel state constitutional amendments that would artificially raise the bar for ballot measures to be passed into law, preventing the passage of measures by simple majority. 

“What we’re witnessing isn’t new, but it certainly has gotten worse,” reaffirmed Hall. “Extremist politicians have clearly made a decision to change the rules of the game rather than align their policies to the will of their own constituents,” she continued. “That’s why the Fairness Project is again leading the charge to protect direct democracy across the country by directly funding campaigns to fight back against these legislative attacks.”

Many of the proposed legislative and constitutional restrictions are coming from states where the Fairness Project and its state-level partners have scored historic wins for reproductive rights, economic justice, and other progressive priorities in recent years.

“Extremist politicians are finally realizing what we’ve known all along: when the people are given the opportunity to claim their power and use ballot measures to improve their own lives, they act on it,” Hall declared. “As a result, politicians are trying to take their power away. Voters are noticing this desperate backlash by out-of-touch politicians, and they’re not going to take it,” she continued. “All Americans deserve to be represented by leaders who stand for our democracy,” concluded Hall, pledging to continue defending against ballot measure attacks nationwide.

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