'Change the rules': How GOP lawmakers are 'using ballot measures' to 'suit their game'

Conservative lawmakers across the country are attempting to make the process of initiating new ballot measures harder, NBC reports.

Progressive organizations, according to NBC, say this strategy is a conservative effort to keep voters in right-leaning states from their right to choose important issues on the ballot, such as abortion rights. It’s also backlash from the recent passing of progressive ballot initiatives like expanding Medicaid and raising minimum wage.

Executive Director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center Chris Melody Fields Figueredo commented, “There’s just so much opposition — not just against reproductive freedoms, but for the vehicles that reproductive freedom groups are now trying to use to protect those freedoms. We know that many politicians don’t like to be told what to do — and what will be critically important to the success of the reproductive freedom movement, as well many other issues that rely on this process, is whether we will still have this tool.”

READ MORE: 'Seismic win': Michigan voters approve constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights

States like Ohio and Missouri currently allow citizen-led ballot measures to pass with a simple majority vote, but GOP leaders in each state are plotting to change that.

Ohio’s Republican officials’ proposed legislation, if passed next year, would require 60 percent approval on ballot measures. And when it comes to Missouri – residents would not have been able to legalize recreational marijuana last month if the GOP had changed the requirement for ballot measures, like they’re planning to do in January.

J.J. Straight, a deputy director at the ACLU told NBC, “After the success we saw in taking reproductive freedom directly to the people, we’ve definitely seen an uptick in these efforts to change the rules to suit their game."

Republican leaders in North and South Dakota failed at expanding the threshold for ballot measures this year, but have said they plan to try again.

READ MORE: 'The right thing to do': Voters in deep red South Dakota approve Medicaid expansion

NBC reports that Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma and North and South Dakota belong to a group of 17 states that currently allow citizen-led ballot measures to amend state constitutions. And as a result, reproductive rights advocates are plotting to submit ballot measures that would preserve abortion rights in the future.

Executive Director of the Fairness Project, Kelly Hall said, “There are so many different ways this process can get disrupted or delayed or basically be terminated altogether. This is one of the most obvious.”

This year, GOP lawmakers in Arizona and Arkansas used their ballot measure processes to prevent voters from amending the constitution. Although two out of three of those attempts failed, the failure doesn’t end their fight.

“They’re trying to use ballot measures — to change ballot measures,” said Figueredo.

In agreement, Straight said, “Ultimately, we believe [citizen-led ballot initiatives] are an accountability tool for people to send a direct message to their government about their expectations and attitudes on big issues.” She continued, “It’s cynical how much these lawmakers want to see that there is less access to them, less of an ability for people to address their government and participate in the policymaking process itself and to lessen how laws might actually reflect the will of the majority of the voters in their states.”

READ MORE: Alarm grows as Florida GOP advances plan to gut ballot initiative process