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ballot initiatives
'All Power to the People': Nebraskans to Vote on Dueling Abortion Ballot Measures
Anti-abortion politicians, said one campaigner, "know Nebraskans want to end the harmful abortion ban and stop government overreach in their personal and private healthcare decisions."
Sep 13, 2024
A ruling by the Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday sets the stage for two separate abortion rights initiatives being on the state ballot this November.
The court ruled that two competing questions focused on abortion care can appear on voters' ballots: one that would enshrine the state's current 12-week ban and another that would affirm Nebraskans have the right to obtain abortion care until "fetal viability," around 24 weeks.
Campaigns for each of the ballot initiatives gathered more than 200,000 signatures in favor of the questions remaining on the ballot.
The Supreme Court decided that a constitutional amendment proposed by the reproductive rights group Protect Our Rights, allowing "all persons the fundamental right to an abortion without interference from the state" until fetal viability, did not violate the state's single-subject rule.
"The first right in our state constitution is for the people to engage in initiatives."
Opponents of the measure had claimed the wording was too vague and that it should not be permitted on ballots because it addressed abortion rights before and after viability as well as how the state should regulate abortion care.
The court said the question "has a singleness of subject" and noted that its ruling aligns with a decision made by the Florida Supreme Court this year.
Lawsuits were brought by an Omaha resident and an neonatologist, both of whom oppose abortion rights.
The state's 12-week abortion ban was passed by the Nebraska Legislature in 2023.
A recent poll by Pew Research found that 50% of adults in Nebraska believe abortion care should be legal in all or most cases, while 46% said it should be illegal.
State Sen. Megan Hunt (I-8) said she was "eager to see the outcome in November, when we will protect the right to abortion in Nebraska."
"All power to the people," said Hunt. "The first right in our state constitution is for the people to engage in initiatives."
Allie Berry, campaign manager for Protect Our Rights, told the Associated Press that "anti-abortion politicians forced an abortion ban into law and then coordinated with activists to launch desperate lawsuits to silence over 200,000 Nebraskans by preventing them from voting on what happens to their bodies."
"They know Nebraskans want to end the harmful abortion ban and stop government overreach in their personal and private healthcare decisions," said Berry. "Today, their plans failed."
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Beware the Republican Plot to Steal the 2024 Election
From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
Aug 31, 2024
The “Party of Lincoln,” as Republicans call themselves, seems intent on undermining just about everything President Abraham Lincoln lived and died for. This includes Republican efforts to upend the way elections are run, by restricting who gets to vote, how voting is conducted, and how votes are counted and certified.
The outcome of the tight presidential race between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will hinge on the votes in a handful of swing states. From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
“It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins,” Berman said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “They’re doing exactly what Trump wanted them to do in 2020. Trump made Georgia the epicenter of the attempt to try to overturn the election. He asked local and State Board of Elections and election officials not to certify the election. They refused to do so; they followed the law. It seems like in 2024 they’re going to extraordinary lengths to try to implement the measures that failed in 2020, to try to rig the election for Trump.”
The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
Georgia Republicans altered how counties count and certify votes. The Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic National Committee, and 10 Democratic county election officials from across Georgia have sued, seeking to roll back the changes. Their lawsuit argues, “Georgia’s State Election Board has passed a host of last-minute rules that threaten to sow chaos and impede the vote-canvassing process.”
Berman warns: “These state and local election boards have been taken over, in some cases, by election deniers, by MAGA extremists…The administration of elections matters so much because you can cast a vote, you can have your vote counted, but it doesn’t actually matter until votes are certified.”
In Texas, the Republican-controlled state government has for years tried to restrict voting in districts where Democratic candidates do well. Donald Trump won Texas by over five percentage points in 2020, but President Joe Biden won the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and El Paso as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that he has purged over 1 million voters from Texas voter rolls. This increasingly common tactic inevitably removes legally-registered voters, often through faulty data screens that target likely Democratic voters.
Meanwhile, Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s currently agreed to do community service to avoid a felony criminal securities fraud trial, and survived an unrelated impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled state senate, has been raiding nonprofit organizations that provide services to immigrant and Latino communities.
Last week, under Paxton’s orders, the homes of a dozen members of LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, were raided and searched by Texas authorities, including SWAT teams. One activist’s door was broken down. Texas House candidate Cecilia Castellano, running for an open seat to represent Uvalde, the town devastated by one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, had her home raided. Government agents took her cell phone and, weeks ahead of election day, threw her campaign into chaos.
LULAC said in a statement, “Attorney General Paxton’s actions clearly aim to suppress the Latino vote through intimidation and any means necessary to tilt the electoral process in favor of his political allies.” LULAC has called on the Justice Department to investigate Paxton over the raids.
Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, said on Democracy Now!, “In the last U.S. Census, they reported 12.1 million Latinos in the state of Texas. For the first time, Latinos actually outnumber non-Hispanic whites, which is at 12 million. When you take into account not just the Latino population in the state of Texas, but the African American and Asian population… the minority community in Texas now stands at over 60%. Texas is and has been a majority-minority state. So, we see these, effectively, as tactics for the Republicans to actually stay in control of the government in Texas.”
If further evidence of Republican attempts to subvert the will of the voters were needed, Pluribus News, a nonprofit news organization, reports that Republican-controlled state governments are altering language on progressive state ballot initiatives to confuse or mislead voters. Arizona, for example, inserted “unborn human being” in place of fetus or embryo in the ballot initiative intended to guarantee the right to an abortion. Voters in Florida and Ohio will face similar confusing language in their ballot initiatives.
In President Lincoln’s final public address, three days before his assassination, Lincoln advocated that the right to vote be granted to formerly enslaved Black men (as only men could legally vote, until 1920). The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
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Arkansas Abortion Rights Organizers Vow to Fight 'Absurd' Rejection of Ballot Measure
"We will not back down," organizers of the initiative said in response to Republican Secretary of State John Thurston.
Jul 11, 2024
Reproductive rights advocates responded with outrage and vowed to fight after Arkansas' top election official on Wednesday moved to disqualify a proposed ballot initiative that—if approved by voters—would enshrine abortion access in the state's constitution.
Arkansans for Limited Government (ALG), the group behind the proposed constitutional amendment, refuted Republican Secretary of State John Thurston's claim that organizers failed to provide the state with a list of all paid canvassers who worked to gather petition signatures for the ballot measure, along with other required materials.
"We worked with the secretary of state's office during every step of the process to ensure that we followed all rules and regulations," ALG said in a statement responding to Thurston's letter to the group on Wednesday. "At multiple junctures—including on July 5 inside of the Capitol Building—we discussed signature submission requirements with the secretary of state's staff. In fact, the secretary of state's office supplied us with the affidavit paperwork, which we used. Until today, we had no reason not to trust that the paperwork they supplied us was correct and complete."
"The secretary of state, and the public, knows that we provided the state with a list of our paid canvassers and all of the required information associated with their employment," ALG added. "They know this because the list we provided to the secretary of state was FOIA'd and released by our opposition in an attempt to intimidate our supporters. Asserting now that we didn't provide required documentation regarding paid canvassers is absurd and demonstrably, undeniably incorrect."
Thurston claimed in his letter—which was immediately praised by anti-abortion lawmakers—that his staff counted 14,143 signatures gathered by paid canvassers, signatures that the official says should be tossed due to ALG's supposed failure to provide the state with a list of the canvassers.
If the 14,143 signatures collected by paid canvassers are subtracted from the 101,525 total signatures gathered by organizers, the abortion rights campaign would be left with 87,382 signatures. That's just over 3,300 short of the number required for a measure to appear on ballots in the GOP-led state, where abortion is almost completely banned.
"We will fight this ridiculous disqualification attempt with everything we have."
The proposed constitutional amendment, which would require just a simple-majority vote to pass, states that Arkansas officials "shall not prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization" or in the cases of rape, incest, or "fatal fetal anomaly." Other state ballot initiatives that—unlike Arkansas'—have received support from national reproductive rights groups would protect abortion access up to 24 weeks.
ALG—whose name, according toThe New York Times, represents "a bid to appeal to the state's libertarians and centrists"—said late Wednesday that "Arkansas law does not empower the secretary of state to make an unfounded legal interpretation, which is what he did today by summarily declaring that we have not completed the steps for qualification."
"We are owed a period to provide a hard copy of the statement, which has been emailed to their office more than a dozen times, if that is what's needed," the group said. "More than 101,000 Arkansans participated in this heroic act of direct democracy and stood up to loudly proclaim their support for access to healthcare. They deserve better than a state government that seeks to silence them."
"We will fight this ridiculous disqualification attempt with everything we have," ALG added. "We will not back down."
Arkansas is one of nearly a dozen states where an abortion rights initiative could be on the ballot in November.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion rights have won every time they've been on the ballot directly—even in reliably red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.
That winning streak has intensified right-wing efforts to prevent abortion rights initiatives from making it to the ballot.
The Associated Pressreported last month that tactics employed by anti-abortion groups and their GOP allies "include attempts to get signatures removed from initiative petitions, legislative pushes for competing ballot measures that could confuse voters, and monthslong delays caused by lawsuits over ballot initiative language."
"In South Dakota, lawmakers passed a bill allowing residents to withdraw their signatures on citizen-led petitions. This launched a comprehensive effort by anti-abortion groups to invalidate a proposed abortion rights ballot measure by encouraging endorsers to withdraw signatures," AP noted. "Meanwhile, opposition groups in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and Nebraska have tried to create their own ballot amendments to codify existing abortion restrictions, though these efforts failed to gather enough signatures in Florida and Colorado."
In Arkansas, as The American Prospect's Gabrielle Gurley wrote Thursday, "canvassers had obtained almost 11,000 more signatures than state law required in 53 counties" even in the face of "verbal threats and doxxing that some of these activists had endured from abortion opponents."
"The campaign waged by the measure's opponents had featured all sorts of attempts to intimidate canvassers," Gurley added. "Opponents of the amendment had used the state's FOIA laws to find the addresses of the paid signature-gathers (ironically, a concurrent signature-gathering campaign to enshrine FOIA in the state constitution failed). Some canvassers were followed on their routes. One Little Rock police officer told canvassers that an order to move them off a public area where a food distribution was underway came from Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders."
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