For the first time in 12 years, there won’t be any citizen initiatives on the ballot this November.
Before 2014, that hadn’t happened since 1978.
Political consultant Chuck Coughlin said the effort is an intentional result of GOP lawmakers’ efforts.
“It's a policy. It's not just a coincidence. It is a policy that has been adopted by, largely, the Republican legislature, and supported by Governor Ducey at the time, and the Arizona Chamber [of Commerce & Industry],” he said.
The Republican-controlled state legislature made several changes to the citizen initiative process when Doug Ducey was governor from 2015 to the beginning of 2023.
Those changes include banning the practice of paying signature gatherers per signature, and increasing the standard of legal compliance.
Arizona Senate Majority Leader John Kavanagh acknowledged legislative changes “obviously did increase the difficulty” of the process, but he said they were justified.
“I am not losing any sleep over this because, quite frankly, the populist citizen initiative that the founders of this state adopted has mutated into a situation where the only people who can put initiatives up are well-funded groups or individuals, often out of state,” the Fountain Hills Republican said.
Kavanagh said the legislative changes have made it harder for those out of state groups to “hijack” Arizona’s citizen initiative process.
But, he also said well-funded organizations or multi-millionaires are the only ones who can currently run citizen initiatives.
“Your average Joe can't even come close to getting the kind of money needed for this, so they're already knocked out just by the massive number of signatures that you have to gather,” he said.
Kavanagh said there could be other reasons for the reason there are no citizen initiatives on the ballot this year.
“It may simply be that individuals — there aren't that many people who want to do initiatives. That's the most obvious reason,” he said. “I mean there's multiple reasons. So, one is there may be a lack of interest. Another may be inflationary costs in the economy.”
Strict compliance
Attorney Jim Barton said one of the biggest barriers to getting an initiative on the ballot is the requirements around petition circulators.
Signatures must be gathered on paper sheets, which must also be notarized. Those sheets frequently face legal challenges.
In those challenges, many thousands of signatures are often thrown out.
Barton has worked on ballot measures since 2008 and worked as the lead counsel on multiple efforts since 2016.
He said the legislature has complicated the signature gathering process unnecessarily.
“By trying to make really silly, useless requirements on the people who circulate petitions, the legislature has effectively silenced tens of thousands of Arizona voters from being able to express their opinion about an initiative, because any little flaw on that on that piece of paper, and they throw out every signature gathered by that circulator. It's outrageous,” Barton said.
This year, a coalition of public school advocates and teachers tried to put a measure on the ballot which would have added restrictions to the state’s private school vouchers program.
The groups needed to collect 256,000 valid signatures to put their initiative on the ballot, but despite turning in more than 415,000 signatures, so many of them were thrown out in a legal challenge that the initiative failed to qualify.
The failure of the Protect Education Act has reignited discourse around the citizen initiative system.
In 2017, the Legislature altered the standard for legal initiatives, changing them from having to meet “substantial compliance” to needing to meet “strict compliance.”
For candidates, it’s still substantial compliance.
For example, if a candidate uses the address of a PO box instead of their physical home address or leaves off the number of the district they’re running for on their paperwork, they'll still be able to run. But an error like that is enough to reject signatures and can be the undoing of a citizen initiative effort.
Barton described that policy “self dealing” and called it “disgusting.”
High costs
Coughlin said one thing that’s changed over the years is the cost to run a successful citizen initiative has increased.
“The underlying cost for collecting signatures has skyrocketed, and now the average cost to get a initiative on the ballot is somewhere north of $5 million. That's a big nut to raise and to put together on a idea,” he said.
Apart from hiring signature gatherers, Coughlin said a successful effort also requires retaining a lawyer and paying to defend the measure in court.
Political parties, Coughlin said, are in a great position to oppose anything they don’t like through negative information campaigns, counter-signature gathering efforts, and funding litigation.
Coughlin successfully worked on an effort to get a citizen initiative on the ballot in 2024. Although voters defeated the measure, which would have established open primaries, Coughlin said his group was only able to make that happen by establishing a very broad bipartisan coalition which gathered millions.
The last citizen initiative to both make it on the ballot, and be voted into law was Proposition 139, the Right to Abortion Initiative which passed in 2024. It established a right to abortion up to fetal viability in the Arizona Constitution.
Dawn Penich was the spokesperson for that effort and said the fact that there aren’t any citizen initiatives on the ballot this year is notable, but unsurprising to her.
She said a group needs at least $3-5 million to start gathering signatures.
“This is a mix of the reality that inflation and cost-of-living has hit every industry, and the burdensome requirements form the legislature, makes it much more expensive to recruit, supervise, and retain all those collectors,” Penich said in a text. “More and more, funders will say, ‘we believe in this policy, but come back to us after you have qualified for the ballot and we will talk to you about finding the campaign.’”
She said other issues that can keep an initiative effort from making it off the ground are getting all the interested parties to an agreement about what to put forward in time, and starting the signature gathering process early enough.
Is it a partisan issue?
Barton said the citizen initiative process isn’t only used by progressives, but the legislative changes making it harder to get the initiatives on the ballot is a result of ideology moving to the “far-right.”
“The Republican legislators are governing far to the right of where the citizens of Arizona are, and the only thing the citizens seem to be able to do to combat that is the citizen initiative process,” Barton said.
Kavanagh said the appearance of this being a partisan issue is because Republicans have controlled the state Legislature for 30 years running.
“I suspect if things flipped and it was the Democrats who had control of the referendum and Republicans were the ones who had to rely on initiative, that the Democrats would cool very quickly to initiative rights,” Kavanagh said.
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