No citizen initiatives made it to the 2026 Arizona ballot. Was that by design?

LAUREN GILGER: ... The dust has settled and despite some major efforts, there will not be any citizen initiatives on this year’s ballot.

Citizen initiatives have been one of the few ways voters in Arizona have bypassed the Legislature to make some pretty significant changes to state law in the past — from establishing the constitutional right to an abortion to raising the minimum wage, to legalizing medical and then recreational marijuana.

But over the years, the Republican-controlled state Legislature has made it a lot harder to get those citizen initiatives on the ballot. And this year’s attempt by public education advocates to give voters a chance to put restrictions on the state’s Empowerment Scholarship program is just the latest example.

KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez has the story from our Politics Desk, and she is here in studio now to explain. Good morning, Camryn.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so first explain to us just how a citizen initiative works. These are the issues you can vote on on your ballot. You’ll see these questions yes or no, right? Sometimes there’s a pretty long list of them these days. Some of those get there because state lawmakers referred them to the ballot. Others go through this pretty extensive citizen initiative process. What does that look like?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It looks like a lot of signature gathering. So you have to have a coalition of folks and you probably have to have some funding behind you. ... But you basically start by hiring a group to help you gather signatures, and then you have to gather a massive amount of signatures to get your initiative on the ballot.

But it very likely would be challenged by a lawsuit, and that’s what’s been happening lately. It’s become sort of par for the course is citizen initiative effort immediately gets a legal challenge. So you also have to have money not just for the signature gathering effort, but also for an attorney. And only if it survives litigation does it make it to the ballot, and then you have to campaign on behalf of your citizen initiative.

So that is the process. And then if voters pass it, it goes into law, and it has a lot of protections. So as opposed to a normal bill going through the state Legislature, a voter-passed initiative has much more protections in state law and can’t as easily be undone.

LAUREN GILGER: How much money can a process like this cost, Camryn?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I’d say minimum $3 million — and you should probably have closer to two or three times that.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, my gosh. OK, so I mentioned a couple of the big things that have been passed via citizen initiative here in the past. What are some of the ones that come to mind for you?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Arizona voters have made some really substantial changes to the state’s laws over time. The Clean Elections Commission itself was created by voters, and voters have made their opinion pretty clear on some issues, which has then crafted how the Legislature acts going forward because they don’t want to run afoul necessarily of citizen initiatives or spurn other ones that they don’t approve of. But I think abortion that you mentioned is probably the most significant one in recent memory, and that passed overwhelmingly.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it did. How have lawmakers then, as we mentioned — mainly Republicans who have been in control of the state Legislature for a very long time — how have they made this process harder over the years?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It’s been sort of a chipping away process from them, and they themselves have been taking advantage of putting things on the ballot more over the last four years that we’ve had split government. So they’ve had to deal with Katie Hobbs in the Governor’s Office, and she’s been vetoing a lot of their partisan legislation. So they’ve been using the ballot as a way to bypass her with their legislative referrals.

But as the citizen initiative process goes, lawmakers have the ability to alter that in state law, and one of the things that they did that was very significant is took away the ability to pay per signature. And another one was to basically make the legal standard much stricter. So that allows citizen initiative petition sheets to basically be thrown out for any very small infraction.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so let’s talk about Prop. 212, or what would have been Prop. 212 had it made it to the ballot. It did not. This was an effort supported by the state’s teacher union, Save Our Schools Arizona. They gathered a reported 415,438 signatures. That’s a lot. They only needed about 256,600 signatures, but they could not prove they had enough signatures to make it to the ballot. How is that possible?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, and I think that situation has kind of reignited this discourse overall, because Democrats were like, "This is an uphill battle. This is untenable. If you’re turning in that many signatures and you still can’t do it, then nobody can do it." And I think there’s a lot of frustration there, but I don’t know that there’s going to be an appetite to change how things work with Republican state lawmakers.

Basically, the hurdles involve signatures getting thrown out by the tens of thousands for small — well, maybe not small — infractions. So things like duplicate signatures or you misdated or didn’t have your petition sheet notarized, that’s another thing that can get them thrown out. Or if one petition signature isn’t eligible for whatever reason, all of the signatures that they gathered get thrown out. So let’s say that one person collected 60,000 signatures. If that person is deemed invalid, none of those signatures count at all.

LAUREN GILGER: And that happened to a lot of signature gatherers this time around, sounds like.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It did.

LAUREN GILGER: One idea out there that’s been brought up by some of the people who are not happy that this didn’t make it to the ballot is that citizen initiatives, the people behind them, should be able to collect signatures online. We should say they are not; they’re out in person, often in the summer in Arizona, getting people to write down their names and addresses on a sheet and fill out the signatures that way. There’s a verified way to gather those signatures online already, right?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It’s called E-Qual, yes. And that is something that I know at least a few state lawmakers brought up recently when Prop. 212 failed, and they were like, "Why don’t we just allow people to collect signatures online?" Like most petitions these days, if you want something to change and you start to gather money like a GoFundMe or a MoveOn or a Change.org, any effort like that typically has an online version. And state law requires you to go out with literal sheets of paper and collect signatures. You can go door-to-door, you can set up a booth and hope people walk up to you. ... It’s a longer process, it’s a more strenuous process — and I think potentially some of that is by design.

LAUREN GILGER: But that has not made it through the state Legislature, obviously, that idea to make this collectible online.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: No, it has not.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Republican lawmakers, though, we should say, who have been behind many of those changes to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot, have an argument to make, too. They say they’re not really citizen initiatives anymore, these are all out-of-state groups with big money. You talked to John Kavanagh at the Capitol. What did he have to say about this?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: He said he’s not losing any sleep over it. And yes, that was his argument. He was like, basically, "There are these big out-of-state interests that pour all of this money and influence into Arizona to get their agenda passed, and it’s not something that’s Arizona-specific or really coming from the Arizona grass roots, and that’s what we’re trying to discourage."

But then he also acknowledged that the so-called grass roots, like your average Joe, can’t really do this on their own because you have to have so much money, you have to have so much time, you have to have a coalition behind you. So you basically have to have a giant group and/or millionaires on your team. So if it’s not possible for them, it’s not really possible for anybody.

LAUREN GILGER: You think this’ll be something you hear about at the Capitol next coming session here?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I think maybe there’ll be an effort by some Democrats, because they’re in the minority, to try to make some of these changes that we talked about, like the E-Qual option. But I don’t know that I can see any of them getting passed.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez with our Politics Desk. Thank you, Camryn.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Thank you.