Opinion: Lawmakers referred Prop. 128, 129 and 132, claiming to fix problems with the ballot initiative process. But beware: they are wolves in sheep's clothing.
Opinion: Lawmakers referred Prop. 128, 129 and 132, claiming to fix problems with the ballot initiative process. But beware: they are wolves in sheep's clothing.Invest in Education, a ballot initiative to tax the rich for schools, broke largely along partisan lines and won passage by less than 52% of the vote in 2020. Republican lawmakers who were incensed at progressives for pushing the measure haven’t forgiven. Nor forgotten.
Proposition 129 limits citizen-led initiatives to a single subject and requires that subject to be spelled out in the title. Read Proposition 128 more carefully and note that any finding of legal problems with a voter-approved measure – even minor points that, if struck, would still leave the bulk of the initiative intact – would allow the Legislature to also sweep funds from the measure and use them however they like.Proposition 129 is more of the same shenanigans.
A number of them have been challenged in court and disqualified over omitted or misleading language in the proposition’s 100-word summary. That safeguard rebuts a key argument from supporters of Proposition 129: That it would prevent special-interest groups from jamming unrelated provisions into one measure to sneak in pet projects.
That said, demanding more than a simple majority for voter-approved revenue measures is extreme. Only nine states require supermajority approval at the ballot box, four of them solely on constitutional amendments. Several key education-funding initiatives in Arizona’s history won with less than the 60% approval threshold that Proposition 132 imposes. Among them: