LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – In recent years, Nebraskans have signed their names and later voted on numerous petition drives, allowing the people to enact new laws and change old ones without going through the Unicameral.
It’s all part of the ballot initiative and referendum process, giving the state’s voters the power to create, amend or repeal laws and ensure the people get a say when the Legislature can’t find consensus.
But after addressing topics like minimum wage, paid sick leave, school choice vouchers and medical marijuana, all laws that have since been targeted, altered or otherwise undone by state leaders, sponsors of the Respect Nebraska Voters ballot initiative hope to step in and tip the scales in the people’s favor.
“I worked tirelessly on both minimum wage and paid sick leave,” ballot sponsor Dawn Essink said. “All of us that spent so many volunteer hours on both of those campaigns were devastated when we saw how the Legislature chose to dilute both of those campaigns.”
Essink and her fellow Respect Nebraska Voters ballot sponsor Jo Giles, who also worked on the paid sick leave campaign, say voters are feeling “disenfranchised” by the changes to laws that weren’t what people intended.
“They see something that they voted for like paid sick leave that they cared so deeply about … and then to see lawmakers take that away from 140,000 Nebraskans, it’s really just maddening,” Giles said.
If passed, the new initiative would require a larger majority of state senators to undo or change any law that voters have passed, from two-thirds of the Legislature to a four-fifths supermajority. That’s 40 of Nebraska’s 49 total senators.
The initiative also aims to strengthen protections for the initiative and referendum processes, again requiring a four-fifths vote to pass any future law that alters those processes.
“It’s hard enough to pass a ballot initiative in Nebraska,” Giles said. “It’s a huge threshold just for us to get something on the ballot and to get something passed, we think it should be a high threshold for lawmakers as well.”
After the initiative was filed with the Nebraska Secretary of State’s Office, Sen. Danielle Conrad said while she’s all for officials respecting the will of voters, right now her and her colleagues have more questions than answers.
She said the processes already built into the constitution can still be used to ensure Nebraskans get a say, without needing to change the rules.
“The remedy is very clear and already available to us: we should run a referendum and tell the Legislature that we the people don’t appreciate their cynical meddling,” Conrad said. “That is a more precise existing strategy that we should fully utilize before just jumping in to amend the constitution, which may have some unintended consequences.”
She adds that a more straightforward way to deal with a “meddling Legislature” or any elected official altering what the people wanted, is to simply vote them out and replace them with politicians who listen to Nebraskans.
“We shouldn’t really be quibbling about how the Legislature can meddle with the will of the people,” Conrad said, “we should be utilizing our voice and every tool we already have available to effectuate and facilitate the will of the people.”
But Giles and Essink say that the other constitutional processes aren’t working well enough to represent voters, or Nebraska wouldn’t be seeing changes to laws that the electorate is so upset about.
“We’ve tried over and over on these issues before we’ve even brought them to the people to vote on,” Giles said. “Putting this in the constitution would allow and protect direct democracy for Nebraskans.”
Conrad also worries that enacting this initiative could make it harder to fix technical flaws in voter-enacted laws, or create unnecessary barriers to ones that require further implementation from the Legislature after being passed, such as the 2022 Voter ID ballot initiative.
Furthermore, she said the measure could even spark competing initiatives like the dueling abortion ballot measures in 2024, with alternatives that restrict the initiative process.
And while Conrad believes Supreme Court case law is ”murky at best” in regards to the single subject rule, she’s unsure whether this initiative would violate it and be the target of a lawsuit.
But Giles said she doesn’t think the initiative violates the single subject law, saying it’s a single constitutional amendment focused on increasing that vote threshold for anything relating to ballot initiatives.
Her and Essink also say they aren’t currently working with any state senators on the initiative, as they want the focus to be a grassroots effort focused on Nebraska voters.
“We normally don’t reach out to the Legislators, we reach out to everyday Nebraskans,” Essink said. “We want Nebraskans voices to be heard and for that to be respected.”
But Conrad said a little input from Nebraska leaders wouldn’t hurt.
“The groups that have launched this effort, again while well intentioned, have done so without coordination with state leaders like myself who are fighting hard every day to protect the will of the people,” she said.
The campaign will officially launch in January, when volunteers plan to begin gathering signatures.
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