Last year, when Missouri Republicans passed a mid-decade congressional map designed to eliminate one of the state’s two Democratic congressional districts, residents responded by doing what the Missouri Constitution has allowed them to do for more than 100 years. They organized a referendum campaign to put the map on the statewide ballot, gathering more than 300,000 signatures within 90 days. But Missouri officials responded with a barrage of unusual tactics to prevent the referendum from reaching voters.
Several officials took the initiative, and unsuccessfully, to challenge the constitutionality of the referendum in federal court. The attorney general has publicly asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to investigate the signature gathering efforts. The Secretary of State produced a public brief accusing the campaign of criminal signature-gathering practices and later acknowledging bias and unfairness in court before the president announced the campaign could begin. The secretary also delayed verification of petition signatures, presumably to ensure that the new maps remain until the 2026 midterm elections, regardless of whether voters ultimately approve them.
The Missouri episode is impressive, but not an outlier. Across states with direct democracy powers, elected officials are increasingly turning their attention to the process itself. Officials are seeking to impose restrictions on the direct democratic process that may seem modest in isolation, but collectively threaten to preclude the use of these rights.
Towards a progressive era Dobbs
To understand the pushback from elected officials, it helps to understand the power of direct democracy itself. About half of states offer some form of direct democracy to their citizens, such as the right to initiate legislation or constitutional amendments or to force popular votes on laws already passed by Congress.
These powers emerged during the Progressive Era as a way to give ordinary citizens more control over their government, but their use has waxed and waned. Interest in power has increased in recent days as advocates use tools to advance policies that have been stalled in state legislatures — often in states where one party controls the legislature, locking out policies that have broad public support. These include raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, legalizing marijuana, and redistricting reform.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationturned over Roe vs. Wade And it accelerated this interest by sending the issue of abortion rights back to the states. From 2022 to 2024, citizens in 10 states used the initiative process to propose constitutional protections for access to abortion, and voters approved seven states. More votes could be held this fall.
backlash
Coinciding with this new interest is a backlash from the very officials who have been used by the public to circumvent these powers. Rather than seek to completely abolish direct democratic power (a move likely to be politically harmful given widespread public support for power), government officials instead pursued a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy by imposing restrictions on virtually every step of the process that were easily missed individually but could collectively preclude the use of power. According to the Equity Project, 2025 will set a record for proposed legislation seeking to undermine the ballot initiative process, nearly double the previous record set just two years ago, with 15 states introducing such measures.
This figure does not take into account the limited discretion of executive branch officials to disrupt election campaigns. Initiatives and referendum campaigns are run under tight deadlines, and state officials are increasingly using pre-approval processes to eat up or completely exhaust time before organizers get on the scene. Ohio State shows how far this can go. There, state law requires supporters to submit a summary of their proposal to the attorney general before gathering signatures for the main petition. But as a federal appeals court found in 2025, the attorney general used this process to exercise unconstitutional “editorial control” over the petition, rejecting the outline of an amendment to end qualified immunity eight times in four years. The court also reprimanded state officials in Arkansas, Missouri, and Montana for using similar gatekeeping tactics. Supporters of the Oklahoma initiative are also challenging a similar requirement in the state Supreme Court, arguing that it gives the secretary of state effective veto power over people’s initiative rights.
States are also creating new hurdles at the petition stage, reducing the number of people who can distribute petitions and increasing their costs. Florida provides a notable example. Congress passed sweeping new restrictions in 2025 after reports the state sent law enforcement to people’s homes to ask if they had signed initiative petitions calling for abortion rights. The law prohibits non-Floridians from distributing petitions and makes it a third-degree felony for Floridians to gather 25 or more signatures without first registering with the state and completing a state-run training program, with each count subject to a $50,000 fine. Ineligible or unregistered circulators, among other various application, verification, and cost requirements. A federal district court recently upheld much of the law, but the plaintiffs appealed.
Other states are pursuing similar restrictions. For example, the state of Arkansas has enacted similarly broad cardiovascular restrictions and enhanced signature requirements, which are the subject of ongoing litigation in federal and state courts. Meanwhile, state courts in Arizona, Michigan, and Ohio have differed on the enforceability of other cardiovascular regulations.
For ballot measures, officials have worked to bias voters against them by controlling what appears on ballots. By 2023, observers were already noting manipulation of ballot language as a new tactic, pointing to conflicts in Arkansas, Idaho, Missouri, and Ohio. Tactics will only intensify. In Ohio in 2024, a state commission chaired by the secretary of state explained that a constitutional amendment aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering actually required gerrymandering, but language voters said it caused confusion. The Montana Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against the state attorney general’s attempts to write a unilateral summary. In Missouri, courts in the past year and a half have ordered the secretary of state to rewrite ballot language that is unfair or misleading.
Even policies that overcome challenges and win voter approval are not safe from government intervention. In some cases, authorities simply refuse to act, delaying implementation of measures already approved by voters. It happened with Medicaid expansion efforts in Maine and Missouri, ultimately leading to lawsuits to force states to implement the measures. In other cases, authorities have become more aggressive, moving to water down or repeal voter-approved measures. That happened recently with voter-approved increases in the minimum wage and paid sick leave in Nebraska, Missouri’s paid sick leave law, Ohio’s marijuana legalization initiative, and Utah’s redistricting reform initiative. The Utah Supreme Court at least ruled that the repeal was unconstitutional, but the Utah Legislature has since retaliated against the justices.
None of these restrictions may seem particularly onerous, but taken together they amount to a concerted effort to make this process so expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with legal challenges that only the best-funded and best-organized campaigns are likely to be able to survive it.
constitutional guardrails
The extent to which elected officials can set such hurdles is hotly contested in the courts.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects the type of political conversation and exchange of ideas inherent in ballot measure campaigns, including the act of circulating petitions. At the same time, because the Constitution does not require states to have direct democratic powers in the first place, the court said that states are left with “considerable leeway to protect the integrity and credibility of the initiative process,” leaving the court with no choice but to navigate the tension between these principles.
How this tension is resolved varies, but an ongoing federal lawsuit over Florida’s sweeping set of restrictions shows how high the stakes are. In an April 2026 ruling, the district court acknowledged that the restrictions left state initiative “virtually dead on all but the most controversial issues where tens of millions of dollars could be raised,” but still refused to block the restrictions. The court reasoned that these results amounted to a “policy argument” for the legislature and were “not a constitutional violation for which this court would grant relief.”
On the other hand, state constitutions may further protect the powers of direct democracy. These documents typically set out basic procedures that citizens must follow and implicitly limit Congress’ ability to impose more stringent requirements. Still, many state legislatures have asked voters, often unsuccessfully, to amend the constitution to make these powers less accessible to citizens. For example, in addition to a possible redistricting referendum this fall, Missouri will vote on a bill in August that would raise voter approval standards for future ballot measures that would require majority approval in the Legislature. each It must be approved by the state’s congressional districts, not by a statewide majority. And courts have generally interpreted state constitutions to allow legislators to fill procedural gaps in the initiative or referendum process that are not specifically addressed in the document, but not to use that power to limit, limit, or otherwise impede citizens’ exercise of these powers. Where exactly the line lies between permissible and impermissible regulations is the subject of much litigation.
In a fitting development, citizens in some states have begun to use the power of direct democracy to protect that very power from government interference. Citizen-led efforts to protect the power of direct democracy have been successful in states such as Arizona and Oregon, and similar efforts were recently announced in Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Montana. However, it remains to be seen whether these campaigns can overcome the challenges described in this article.
Derek Klinger is senior advisor for the National Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin School of Law.
Recommended Citation: Derek Clinger, A silent campaign against direct democracySᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (July 13, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/quiet-campaign-against-direct-democracy.
