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By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
February 2, 2024
Although the push for ballot initiatives was dead before the 2024 session of the Indiana General Assembly even started, a Democratic lawmaker pulled one last maneuver to show voters who was listening.
Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie, authored House Joint Resolution 1, which would have been the first step in establishing a ballot initiative process to allow voters to both enact statutes and amend the Indiana Constitution. Ballot initiatives are touted as a way for voters to be heard when they feel their state legislature is not paying attention to what they want and need.
From conversations with her constituents, Errington believes the Indiana General Assembly has gotten out of step with the Indiana electorate. HJR 1 was offered to give Hoosiers a way to get issues important to them on the ballot.
However, her resolution stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, blocked from even getting a hearing.
The retired teacher was not surprised, but she also did not want the matter to die unnoticed. So when the Indiana House was preparing to vote on House Bill 1265, a potpourri of election provisions, Errington stepped to the podium and offered her amendment.
The amendment would have put a nonbinding question on the November ballot, asking “Shall citizens be allowed to initiate a ballot referendum in Indiana?”
Neither the Indiana General Assembly nor the governor would have been required to take any action once the results were tallied. Rather, Errington said, it would have informed state lawmakers how strong the appetite for ballot initiatives is among Hoosiers.
The amendment was defeated, 66 to 27, but Errington had what she wanted.
“Even though it failed, you have the record of how people voted,” Errington said of the final vote tally on her amendment. “And I think that’s another thing that voters can consider. … I think it can be a tool for voters in the election.”
This was not the first time the issue of ballot initiatives had been raised at the Indiana General Assembly. Former state Sen. John Bushemi, D-Gary, had repeatedly advocated for a ballot initiative process from the late 1970s into the 1980s. However, his resolutions, he said, “went as far as the closest garbage can.”
Interest in getting a ballot initiative process started in Indiana has been revived recently by voters in Michigan passing legislation legalizing marijuana and voters in Ohio putting a right to abortion in the state’s constitution.
Errington said she hopes Hoosiers would not use the ballot initiative option often. However, since she was first elected in 2010, her constituents have been asking why they, themselves, cannot put the question of legalizing marijuana directly before the voters, given that the General Assembly will not even debate such legislation. The interest in ballot initiatives has escalated among Hoosiers, she said, since lawmakers passed a near-total abortion ban in August 2022.
Results from the 2023 Hoosier Survey from the Bowen Center for Public Affairs at Ball State University mirror Errington’s assertion that the legislature is out of step with the opinion of a majority of Hoosiers. The poll found 86% of Hoosiers support some form of marijuana legalization and 59% support some kind of access to abortion service.
“So is it any wonder that the people in this state are losing confidence in us to make laws that reflect their views,” Errington asked her colleagues when she introduced her amendment. “Is it any wonder that they’re losing interest in voting, when their legislators don’t listen to them after they’re elected and when their legislators actually do the opposite of what Hoosiers tell the pollster they want? So is it any wonder that voter turnout in Indiana is consistently among the lowest in the country?”
Giving voters a safety valve
Voters in 24 states, including Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, have the power to place a statute or constitutional amendment on the ballot, according to the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. The power varies with voters in some states being able to directly put a measure on the ballot, while voters in other states have to submit the measure and get their legislature’s approval.
Indiana voters do have limited power to amend the state’s constitution. However, the legislature controls most of the process, including drafting, debating and voting on whether to let citizens consider such a proposed amendment. Only when lawmakers have approved the provision twice, does the question appear on the ballot.
Dane Waters, founder of the I & R Institute, is an advocate for giving voters the ability to amend their state’s constitution and to initiate and repeal laws passed by their state’s legislature. He described ballot initiatives as being a safety value that enables voters to enact their desires on very specific issues, such as marijuana legalization, access to abortion and hikes in minimum wage.
Voters, Waters said, do not want to take over the legislative process and have every issue appear on the ballot. They are fine with having their lawmakers handling the “day-to-day minutia.”
But with a high-profile issue, legislators are “either too scared to deal with it or, politically, they just don’t want to deal with it,” Waters said. Consequently, voters get frustrated when the issues they care most about are not being addressed and that frustration, he said, has fueled the rise of radicalism and extremism in the United States.
“What are they supposed to do? They have to lash out somehow,” Waters said of the voters. “So give them the initiative process, put the proper checks and balances on it. I feel very confident that it will end a lot of the extremism and polarization going on in our Congress and in our state legislatures.”
Indiana Republican lawmakers have been resistant to ballot initiatives.
Rep. Matt Lehman, R-Berne, spoke against Errington’s amendment during the floor debate. Echoing the opposition of the majority leaders during Organization Day at the Statehouse last November, he said the country’s founders created a representative democracy so every single issue did not have to be voted on by the citizens. Instead, voters elect senators and representatives to represent them in the law-making process.
“They do weigh in,” Lehman said of Indiana voters. “It’s called an election. And that is how we change things in this body is through an election.”
Keeping politicians out of the process
Senate minority leader Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, authored Senate Joint Resolution 18, which like Errington’s resolution, would amend the state constitution to give Indiana voters the ballot initiative.
The two resolutions are very similar. They each allow Hoosiers to propose and adopt amendments to the constitution and to enact statutes. Also, voters would have the ability to approve or reject, through referendum, any statute or part of any statute enacted by the Indiana General Assembly.
To get an initiative on the ballot, both resolutions require a petition with a draft of the proposed law or amendment be circulated among Indiana voters. Then, the petition must be signed by 2% of the number of voters who cast a ballot for the Indiana Secretary of State in the most recent election. Based on the 2022 election results, 19,998 signatures would be required.
An initiative or a referendum approved by a majority of the voters would take effect five days after the results of the public question are certified under both resolutions. The General Assembly would have limited power to amend or repeal a ballot-initiative measure and the governor would not be able to veto it.
Taylor’s resolution includes an additional provision that would give voters the ability to propose an initiative or a referendum for their local governments.
Sharon Dolente, senior adviser at Promote the Vote Michigan, said a key to the ballot initiative process is to entrust civil servants – not politicians – with the administrative duties.
Dolente has worked on voting rights issues for 20 years and helped guide Promote the Vote’s successful campaigns that got two ballot initiatives passed in 2018 and 2022 in Michigan. Both measures, she said, made the state’s election “more accessible and secure,” with the 2018 initiative implementing a citizen redistricting commission and the 2022 initiative addressing election administration issues.
“It’s very empowering, I think, for citizens to initiate action on their own,” Dolente said of ballot initiatives. “In a time in which people do say they feel like their elected officials don’t respond to them or represent them or there’s some sort of disconnect between their elected officials and the citizens’ priorities, I think it can be really powerful for citizens to be able to make policy directly.”
The spark for the 2018 and 2022 ballot initiatives came when Michigan was identified as being one of only two states (the other was Mississippi) as having failed to pass any pro-voter legislation that expanded access to the ballot in decades, Dolente said. Michiganders responded strongly because the state has had an “extraordinary history” in the 20th century of being a leader in election policies and they believe individuals should not face barriers in “making their voices heard at the ballot box.”
Dolente credited the success, partially, to the ballot initiative process in Michigan being insulated from elected officials. The Bureau of Elections, which essentially manages the initiative process, is run by a civil servant and staffed by civil servants, so they are removed from partisan political interference, she said.
“One thing I’ve always said about our democracy, valid proposals are not a Democrat or Republican issue, because voters don’t see it that way,” Dolente said. “When you are talking to voters about a voting rights ballot initiative, it is just voters you’re talking to. They are no longer having to necessarily affiliate with their partisan identity.”
‘The people reserve to themselves the power’
As the 2024 legislative session nears the halfway point in the Indiana General Assembly, both ballot initiative resolutions appear to be dead, since neither received a committee hearing.
Errington’s HJR 1 was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee. She said the committee chair, Rep. Chris Jeter, R- Noblesville, told her the resolution would not get a hearing, because the Republican caucus did not support the measure.
Even though her resolution stalled, Errington said pushing the issue was necessary, because “it’s something that, I think, people want.”
In a statement to The Indiana Citizen, Jeter was not convinced a ballot initiative would be a positive change.
“Indiana has a strong representative democracy where Hoosiers count on their elected officials to vet issues and vote on policies that would impact them,” Jeter said. “Our part-time citizen legislature’s structure also ensures maximum accountability from elected representatives. We currently have a thoughtful and narrow constitutional amendment process that has served our state well and there’s not a consensus that any changes are needed.”
Reading the ballot initiative resolutions introduced this session, Bushemi, the former Democratic state senator, was inspired by the words, “The people reserve to themselves the power, independent of the General Assembly ….”
“That’s very important because we, citizens, need to reserve to ourselves the power,” Bushemi said. “As a citizen, I want the full right to initiate constitutional amendments and statutes or their repeal or their modification, because the citizens are and should always be viewed as the ultimate lawmakers. The legislature works for us, not the other way around.”
Dwight Adams, a freelance editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
