The Voice of the People

When evaluating your local ballot measures, please choose wisely

If you remember a decade ago, voters in the United Kingdom made waves globally by voting for Brexit—a formal withdrawal from the European Union. Fueled by grievances over immigration and a loss of sovereignty, and against the advice of the news media and most economic experts, more than 17 million British voters opted to make the plunge. In the immediate aftermath of that shocking verdict, Google searches in Britain for “what is the EU?” flew off the charts. The clear message: millions of people who voted for Brexit had no idea what they were voting on in the first place. In the years since, while the British economy has not completely collapsed, the once-great superpower has fallen into a permanent state of stagnation and decay. Worst of all, immigration has in fact accelerated since the Brexit vote.

In recent history, Brexit remains the most famous international manifestation of a process known as direct democracy, where citizens bypass the legislative process and enshrine a policy into law through a direct vote. Direct democracy, while potentially delivering a clear popular mandate without the messy deals of politics, is peppered with serious risks. Imagine, say, if a ballot initiative were called that would, if passed, decree an immediate 25% reduction in the price of everything. What’s to say that uninformed voters wouldn’t throw caution to the wind and just ignore the fundamental laws of economics? I, for one, am in no mood to gamble the American economy on a rerun of Soviet-style central planning. And furthermore, people are usually too busy to study complex ballot questions, often deliberately transcribed in cryptic legalese. Thus, we often decide in a split second to simply go with our gut, even if it means stepping on a live mine.

This election year, voters in 40 American states will have decided a monumental 164 constitutional amendments and other direct ballot initiatives encompassing a swathe of the most divisive and consequential matters of American political debate. The outcomes of these initiatives will continue to solidify the reputation of the states as laboratories of democracy, where controversial ideas can be implemented on a smaller scale before the more rigorous test of surviving our divided federal government.

Here are just a handful that people across the country will settle on November 3:

1) Voters in six states, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia will decide on a constitutional amendment that ensures voting is exclusively the domain of U.S. citizens

2) California voters will decide between opposing initiatives regarding a 5% wealth tax on individuals and entities holding assets greater than $1 billion

3) Colorado voters will decide whether to ban sex change operations for minors as well as scholastic athletic participation under a different gender from one’s birth certificate

4) Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, and Tennessee (more on that one later) will vote on loosening criteria for judges to deny bail to suspected criminals

5) Virginia and Nevada voters will decide on a measure that would enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions

This year, voters in the state I reside in, Tennessee, will be asked to vote on three constitutional amendments, all of which are supported by the legislature’s Republican majority and opposed by the Democratic minority. While Amendment 2, which preemptively prohibits the Tennessee General Assembly from levying property taxes in the future, is the most straightforward, Amendments 1 and 3 tackle the more emotional subject of criminal justice, with passionate arguments on both sides.

Let’s elaborate on one of them.

Amendment 1, if passed, will expand restrictions on the right to bail for defendants charged with especially heinous crimes such as acts of terrorism and aggravated child rape, rather than exclusively for capital offenses (as is the case today). While proponents have insisted that bail will not automatically be denied to such defendants, Amendment 1’s detractors, such as nationally recognized Memphis State Representative Justin Pearson, warn of human error and a “disproportionate harm on poor folks… on Black folks, on Latino Folks.” On the flipside, Franklin State Senator and Amendment 1 supporter Jack Johnson has warned that judges are “hamstrung by the constitution” and Tennessee desperately needs “to equip our court system with the tools they need to keep our community safe.” Tennessee Voices for Victims co-founder Verna Wyatt was more blunt: “people are sick of hearing stories about innocent people being killed, raped, or severely injured by someone who’s out on bond.”

In summary, if we approve the amendment, it is simply inevitable that some marginalized Tennesseans will be locked up and denied bail without good cause. And if we reject it, it is also inevitable that dangerous criminals guilty of wicked crimes will be released on bail, free to roam our streets and hunt for new victims.

Tennessee Amendment 1 is thus a literal matter of life and death, no matter which outcome prevails.

I would like to also highlight the cases of California and Colorado, two states home to many of my most loyal readers. Instead of a manageable three initiatives, voters in the Golden and Centennial States will each encounter an overwhelming 14 different ballot questions, not including county and municipal initiatives. Beyond the above-mentioned votes on gender identity and wealth taxes, folks in those two states must confront not only tax-and-spending measures but also fundamental questions about the security of elections themselves.

As both Democratic-governed states have resisted a universal voter identification mandate, concerned citizens took their own initiative to collect signatures, including nearly 875,000 in California, to bypass their state legislatures. If passed by voters, California Proposition 39 and Colorado Amendment 84 would force a constitutional amendment that would require presenting a government-issued ID to vote in the future. Predictably, supporters and opponents of these voter identification amendments fall on partisan lines. While Democrats like incumbent California Governor Gavin Newsom and his likely successor Xavier Becerra have condemned Proposition 39 as “voter suppression” and “intimidation,” they ignore, as Californians for voter ID director Julie Luckey has stressed, that voter identification is mere “standard practice” in countries such as Brazil, Canada, and Japan.

Considering how long it takes for California to count its votes, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to just consider fixing a clearly broken system and restore trust to our elections.

So odds are, within the next several weeks, you and millions of other Americans will be confronted with a direct ballot question as no longer a mere voter, but a judge, jury, and executioner. Thus, when evaluating ballot initiatives with such gravity, whether over crime and punishment, taxes and bonds, transgender athletics, or election security, deciding on a split-second whim isn’t just irresponsible—it’s potentially lethal. For any informed citizen, seeing an election not go your way is certainly painful. But witnessing an error of popular judgment cast in stone forever? British voters found out the hard way barely a decade ago that whatever outcome they hoped from Brexit, if they even knew what Brexit would entail— it just did not work out in practice. Whatever your persuasion, the best outcome is always the informed outcome.