As Nebraskans fill out their ballot this year, they will be voting on abortion, paid sick leave, medical marijuana — in fact encountering more citizen-led ballot measures than in any previous election.
Voters might want to get used to this.
Four years into the 2020s, Nebraska has already recorded more citizen-led ballot measures than in any other decade. Half of the measures since 2000 have come in the last four years.
And there’s an underlying reason that both deep-pocketed Democratic groups and wealthy Republicans like the Ricketts family are increasingly funding ballot measures: They often succeed.
The last seven citizen-led ballot measures to make it onto the ballot have won voters’ blessing and become law.
Widening partisan gaps in the Legislature and the advent of paid circulators who can complete the state’s tough signature gathering process are also contributing to the growing use of ballot measures, suggested former officials and ballot measure sponsors.
“I think as long as … there are things that people want to see, and they’re not being dealt with either from a legislative or administrative capacity, then you’re going to see more efforts at initiative processes,” said Patrick O’Donnell, who served as clerk of the Legislature for more than 40 years before retiring in 2022.
This year, voters will have their say on dueling abortion measures, one of which, Initiative 434, enshrines a stricter abortion ban and one, Initiative 439, that provides more access to an abortion, similar to what was legal in Nebraska before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
They will also vote on medical marijuana, paid sick leave and public funding for private school scholarships, deciding five initiatives and one referendum in all.
Nebraska is one of only 15 states that allows citizens to get constitutional amendments, changes to state law and also veto referendums on the ballot.
This year organizers had to collect roughly 86,430 valid signatures to get law changes on the ballot, while constitutional amendments required roughly 123,470 signatures.
State law requires these efforts to fan out across the state, getting signatures from 5% of registered voters in at least 38 counties.
Far from everyone succeeds. Five other measures that were cleared to gather signatures never turned them in, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
“These are very challenging issues to get before the public. It takes a lot of very talented, organized people to get those signatures gathered,” said John Gale, former Nebraska secretary of state who used to oversee ballot measures. “It is an amazingly complex process.”
During Gale’s 19-year tenure as secretary of state starting in 2000, 13 citizen-led measures made it on the ballot. In contrast, his successor, Bob Evnen, has seen 12 measures since taking office in 2019.
But Gale said he doesn’t see this as unusual.
“I’m of the mind that it’s just this particular year. I don’t see a strong trend. It’s not unusual to have four to six issues,” he said.
Others disagree, citing legislative gridlock and partisan politics as fuel for the record number of citizen-led measures.
Citizen-led ballot measures were few and far between when O’Donnell took over as clerk in 1978. But, as the years passed, more measures started popping up on the ballot, especially in the last decade, he said.
“When legislatures fail to act or at least deal with an issue … then you’re going to see initiative efforts, and that’s what we’re seeing today,” O’Donnell said.
The disconnect between lawmakers and citizens on certain issues is a throughline with many of the citizen-led measures in recent decades, said Walt Radcliffe, a paid lobbyist who has worked on over a dozen initiatives in Nebraska since 1980.
In the past four years, lawmakers introduced bills or resolutions regarding voter ID, paid sick leave and medical marijuana. In all those cases, inaction led activists to seek alternative routes.
“Ballot initiatives are becoming … a tool by which we create policy in Nebraska, and people on both sides of those ballot initiatives are realizing that and spending more money on educating Nebraskans on whether to vote for or against,” said former state Sen. Adam Morfeld, a Democrat from Lincoln who is currently a ballot initiative organizer.
The amount of cash injected into citizen-led measures has climbed significantly in the last quarter century — even when adjusted for inflation.
In the 2000s, measure sponsors spent an average of $1.6 million in today’s money to get on the ballot and to support their proposal.
The five campaign committees with issues on the ballot this year have reported spending an average of $3.4 million in the most recently available campaign finance filings. That figure will rise as the groups make their final pleas to voters.
Major donors have already steered millions into the contests. That includes the Ricketts family, which has given $3.6 million to the campaign to preserve stricter abortion restrictions. The effort to repeal taxpayer funding for private school scholarships has received $2.7 million from the national teachers union and nearly $1.2 million from the state teachers union.
Much of the money spent by the groups is to pay signature gatherers — a practice made legal by a 1988 Nebraska Supreme Court decision.
“Nebraska is an inexpensive state to conduct an initiative drive in,” Radcliffe said. “For anywhere between a million and a half and $2 million you can basically assure … that you’re going to get your initiative on the ballot.”
Another change came in 2000 when voters passed a law requiring each measure focus on only a single subject. In 2020, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that a medical marijuana measure violated the single-subject rule and ordered the question be removed from the ballot.
That outcome is why there are two different medical marijuana initiatives on this year’s ballot. (A different court fight is currently playing out to try to invalidate signatures collected for those initiatives and render the vote meaningless.)
Across the country, voters will decide 57 measures put on the ballot by citizens, according to tracking by the website Ballotpedia. That is up from the last two election cycles, but down from 2018 and 2016.
Overall the 21st century has seen a reasonably high level of these measures, but there hasn’t been major increases or decreases during that time, said John Matsusaka, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Initiative and Referendum Institute, which studies the initiative and referendum process across the country.
Nebraska’s measures seem to come in bunches and there doesn’t appear to be a clear trend, he said.
In Nebraska, some of the recent initiatives have created an interesting dynamic: An electorate that reliably elects conservative leaders has backed a series of policies opposed by many of those same conservative leaders. In the last six years Nebraska voters have expanded Medicaid, allowed casino gambling, raised the minimum wage and capped interest rates charged by payday lenders.
That trend has played out in several neighboring states and could happen again this year, according to recent polling and reporting by the nonprofit Midwest Newsroom.
“You almost always see initiatives being used by the group that is out of power in the state. So you’re going to see in conservative states, more liberal or progressive types of initiatives,” Matsusaka said.
One notable exception in Nebraska came in 2022, when voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment establishing voter ID. That measure was championed by conservatives, including state Sen. Julie Slama, a Republican from Dunbar.
Prior to the ballot measure, multiple voter ID proposals had been introduced in the Legislature, but they never advanced. Once it made it on the ballot, Slama described voter ID as a common sense solution supported by Republicans and Democrats, according to the Nebraska Examiner.
More recently, Slama, who is not seeking reelection, was asked if she might champion another conservative cause that thus far has failed to pass in the Legislature: the push to make Nebraska award all its Electoral College votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote in presidential elections.
Speaking at the State of Our Union: Nebraska event in Lincoln on Oct. 23, Slama said she hadn’t considered taking winner-take-all to the ballot.
“I think that voters should have a say,” she said. “I think that whether that’s on a ballot initiative or in the Legislature — the voters do have their say when they have elections and they elect their state senators, so that’s an option too.”
Reporter Jeremy Turley contributed to this report.
