In the News

In recent years, the ballot initiative process has seen many traditional progressive policy ideas pass, even in red or purple states. According to the Fairness Project, a nonprofit organization that helps support progressive ballot measures, dozens of initiatives have passed with bipartisan support in recent years

“I call these bills ‘death by a thousand cuts,’” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the progressive ballot initiative group The Fairness Project. “When you hear about each one in isolation, they seem like not that big a deal. But taken together, they have an exclusionary effect on people’s participation in democracy.”

A left-leaning advocacy group called the Fairness Project has created a playbook for using ballot initiatives to go around GOP-led state legislatures. Since 2016, it has backed successful initiatives to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid.

There have also been recent successes with ballot measures for economic and social justice, owing to the work of the Fairness Project. Founded in 2015 by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the project has won 31 of 33 ballot measures (affecting 18 million people) to raise wages, stop predatory payday lenders, expand health-care access, and more.

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which backs progressive state ballot measures across the country, described last year’s abortion rights victories as “accelerant on an already burning fire.” But Hall also pointed to recent triumphs on issues such as Medicaid expansion and minimum wage hikes as driving factors.

“People's enthusiasm for ballot measures has to also include space for protecting the process itself,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which funds and organizes progressive state ballot measure efforts across the country.

“We continue to see a wide gulf between how voters are expressing their desires and how many extremist legislatures are acting,” Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, an advocacy group that backs progressive ballot measures, says.

Republican lawmakers have sought to make it harder to get citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. “Those lawmakers know their ideological views are out of sync with their voters,” Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, told The Guardian. “They are trying to change the rules of the game.”