Democrats Muddy the Waters on Ballot Initiatives to Thwart Democracy

Democrat officials are intentionally obstructing citizen-led initiatives to cut taxes and pass mandatory Voter ID this November. Because the ideas are wildly popular with voters, Democrats know they must rig the process or mislead the public to get their way.

In 24 states, citizens can place a policy or initiative on the ballot if it garners enough signatures. This ensures that policies that are popular enough go directly to voters for a decision and can’t be blocked by politicians in state capitals. But Democrats are increasingly taking advantage of a loophole in this system to put their thumb on the scale before a question ever reaches voters.

In most states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives, the group sponsoring the initiative writes the proposed law. But the wording that actually ends up on the ballot – the question that voters answer yes or no to – is almost always decided by state officials, often the attorney general. Those officials can write biased questions that sway voters in one direction or another.

Democrats have mastered this dishonest ploy, which is on full display this year by three liberal attorneys general in Washington, California, and Massachusetts.

Let’s start on the West Coast.

A group called Let’s Go Washington gathered half a million signatures from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in the state to repeal a tax hike passed in March. While dubbed a “millionaires’ tax,” the 9.9 percent levy does not include guardrails to prevent it from being imposed on earners making less than that amount in the future.

The law is set to go into effect in 2028, but wealthy residents, including most famously Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, are already leaving the state in droves. The law also faces serious legal questions, as the state Supreme Court previously ruled an income tax unconstitutional in the 1933 case Culliton v. Chase.

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen has openly acknowledged the tax hike is meant to challenge that ruling. As much as tax hikes might be all the rage among Democrat politicians, they remain unpopular with everyday people even in deep blue Washington, and voters in the state have repeatedly rejected them, as AMAC Newsline previously reported.

But Washington Democrats aren’t about to let a little thing like the will of the people get in the way of their “tax the rich” talking point. Democrat Attorney General Nick Brown wrote an impact statement for the petition, which will appear on the ballot, that claims repealing the tax hike “would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education (including universities and community colleges), and human services (primarily healthcare).”

He wrote that language after being lobbied by groups supporting the tax hike, as Center Square reported. But it’s misleading, because any potential cuts will not go into effect until at least 2029, according to Ryan Frost with the Washington Policy Center.

“So, no current school district, college, healthcare system, or hospital has any funding that depends on any of this revenue, because it doesn’t exist yet,” Frost wrote. “How are we cutting education with money that doesn’t exist yet?”

In other words, Brown is shamelessly lying to voters on a ballot question in a blatant attempt to rig the election according to his own partisan priorities.

It’s a similar story down in California, where Attorney General Rob Bonta is stacking the deck against a Voter ID ballot initiative.

In 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law banning municipalities from creating their own Voter ID requirements after the city of Huntington Beach passed an initiative to verify eligibility. In response to Newsom’s ban, organizers gathered 1.3 million signatures to put Voter ID on the ballot this November, according to National Review.

But Bonta opposes Voter ID requirements, in contrast to 80 percent of Americans and at least 56 percent of Californians.

The initial petition, Proposition 39, asked voters to support “additional voter identification and citizenship verification requirements.” Bonta then rewrote it to focus not on election integrity, but on how some people supposedly would be stopped from voting.

The ballot language that California voters will see says that a “yes” vote “invalidates mail ballots that do not have the last four digits of designated government-issued identification number written on envelope” and “prohibits in-person voting without presenting government-issued identification.”

The goal is clear: scare voters with ominous hypotheticals without focusing on the actual plain purpose of the law.

A supporter of Voter ID, Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio put it succinctly. “When Rob Bonta didn’t think we could get the signatures on Prop. 39, he provided a relatively fair ballot title,” DeMaio said. Now that it is on the ballot, Bonta is “corruptly trying to rig the election against Prop. 39 by changing the ballot title to a biased and dishonest one.”

California voters will at least get a chance to weigh in on the measure, as biased as it may be. But the same cannot be said for voters in Massachusetts, where Attorney General Andrea Campbell has perfected the “heads I win, tails you lose” technique.

Bay State residents had rallied to get Initiative Petition 25-18 on the ballot, which would have cut the state’s income tax from five percent to four percent over the next three years. Around 85,000 citizens signed a petition to put the measure in front of voters. So far, so good.

But under state law, the attorney general writes a summary – which is supposed to be fair and neutral – regarding the ballot measure’s substance. Instead, Campbell wrote a summary that intentionally distorted what the petition would do, falsely telling voters that it wouldn’t lower the capital gains tax.

Progressive activists then filed a legal challenge to the summary. The result? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court tossed out the entire ballot initiative. It was a win-win for leftists – either voters would be lied to on the ballot, or the tax cut, supported by a majority of voters, would be removed entirely.

“Democrats couldn’t be happier with what their own ‘error’ wrought,” The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote back in July. “Not so elated are voters who saw their right to direct democracy subverted by a dirty trick.”

Democrats love lecturing Americans about how Republicans are a “threat to democracy.” But Democrats have proven time and again that this charge applies more to them than their opponents.

Nick Brown, Rob Bonta, and Andrea Campbell all preside over deep blue states where the most radical factions of the Democrat Party almost always get what they want. The moment that voters organize to rebuke the worst elements of the progressive platform, however, they do not hesitate to lie and cheat to undermine the democratic process. To Democrats, “democracy” is only a good thing insofar as it produces their preferred outcomes.