In the News

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a group working on ballot measures around the country sees Missouri as a microcosm of a larger anti-democratic dynamic manifesting across the country. “Politicians are going well beyond their legal obligations in their roles, their legal responsibilities to faithfully execute their offices.

“This is not isolated to Ohio,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the progressive ballot measure group The Fairness Project.

“There are a lot of elected officials leading state legislatures that are being unapologetic, brazen, relentless — choose your adjective — about the fact that they don’t care what voters think on this issue and that their ideological stance on this is going to dictate the outcome,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project.

“Attacks, through state legislatures, on the ballot measure process have been pretty consistent and pretty aggressive for the last several (election) cycles,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which has helped pass progressive measures in red states.

“This argument about rural hospital closures has been an incredibly compelling argument to voters,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a national nonprofit that has successfully pushed ballot measures to expand Medicaid in seven states.

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.