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Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, described a \u201cgrowing trend of tactical ways to make the process harder,\u201d pointing to her group\u2019s tally of 108 laws introduced this year in 26 states that would make technical tweaks to the rules surrounding ballot initiatives.<\/p>\n
Since 2017, Fields Figueredo said, the center had counted a fivefold increase in bills introduced and enacted that would make it more difficult to pass ballot measures.<\/p>\n
Sometimes those tweaks take Kafkaesque forms.<\/p>\n
In Arkansas, for instance, a drive to establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission ran into a deviously written 2015 law requiring that canvassers for the ballot initiative pass a federal background check conducted by the State Police.<\/p>\n
But there was a catch. The State Police could not do federal background checks. So the group behind the ballot drive, Arkansas Voters First, pulled what information it could from publicly available records and submitted thousands more signatures than required. The secretary of state rejected those background checks on the grounds that the canvassers had not \u201cpassed,\u201d and threw out more than 10,000 signatures.<\/p>\n