In the News

“Today, the people of South Dakota have preserved their right to use direct democracy,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, which campaigned against Amendment C and has helped several states expand Medicaid via voter referendums since 2017.

“Everyone understands that this is both a fight for direct democracy, but it’s also a proxy election for the issues that voters will face in the ballot box in November,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project.

There’s a path forward in the states: If the Supreme Court does indeed overturn Roe, enshrining reproductive rights in state constitutions via ballot measures will guarantee the protection of reproductive health care for years to come, particularly in states where Republicans control the legislature.

We talk with Kelly Hall of the Fairness Project, which is gathering signatures to put a referendum on the ballot this fall to bypass the legislature and take the matter directly to voters. If they approve it, the measure would amend the state’s constitution to make reproductive freedom a right.

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.

While much of the media and advocacy attention has focused on these suppressive efforts, missing from the conversation is another pernicious and coordinated attempt to short-circuit democracy: the increasingly aggressive campaign by Republican-dominated state legislatures to shut down the citizen-driven ballot measure process.

“It is a death by 1,000 cuts,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an organization that focuses on economic and social justice ballot measures. “Very rarely do we see an attack on our democracy that is an outright ban on voting or on ballot measures.”

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, told Axios: "All of these barriers may not feel like they're insurmountable, but just like the other accounts on voting rights, it's sort of cumulative, which makes using direct democracy harder."