AR leaders are trying to take away our voices

Arkansas leaders have a problem with listening to their bosses — us.

We voters can choose our elected representatives, who will propose and vote on laws as they see fit. But in this state we can also do the job ourselves by using the ballot initiative process, which involves gathering tens of thousands of voter signatures in order to put a new law up for a direct, statewide popular vote. If you’re a regular at a local farmers market, you’ve probably seen such signature-gathering efforts firsthand.

For more than 10 years, however, the Arkansas General Assembly and other Republican officials have been chipping away at our ability to use this process. They’ve added hoops to jump through for signing up volunteers or paid staff to gather signatures. They’ve increased the number of counties where signers must live. They’ve imposed impossible reading-level rules for ballot descriptions. And they’ve created nonsensical requirements for gatherers to examine potential signers’ government IDs, read lengthy ballot titles to them and say out loud that fraudulently signing a petition is a crime.

In other words, they’re busy making the process needlessly uncomfortable and difficult, even when nobody’s doing anything wrong, so that ballot initiatives are stuck in “a game you can’t win,” in the words of the nonprofit Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families. Several of those laws come after legislators in 2022 tried but failed to convince us voters to give away our own power and make ballot initiatives harder to pass.

Why are they doing this? Our Republican leaders pretend it’s to prevent election fraud, but no: The actual instances of such fraud in the past two decades could be counted on one hand. The simple truth is they don’t like the fact that despite Arkansas’ red politics, its voters keep approving blue policies — things like legalizing and expanding medical marijuana, raising the minimum wage and, if we’d had the chance in 2024, possibly protecting the right to some abortions as other red states have done. Red voters voting in blue ways is very inconvenient for Republicans, and they’re determined to put a stop to it. Almost a decade after the approval of medical marijuana, for example, the party is still working to kneecap the program.

This isn’t isolated to Arkansas, either. Republicans across the country are working to strip away voters’ ability to protect abortion rights and other policies — and to straight-up ignore the voters after they vote for those protections, anyway. In our neighbor to the north, the governor this month signed a law simply repealing a voter-approved proposition that guaranteed paid sick leave and tied minimum wage increases to inflation. Republicans in Arkansas and other states are acting like we work for them instead of the other way around.

But they’ve got a fight on their hands. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Arkansas and several partner organizations are suing to stop the most recent set of restrictive laws. And many of the same groups are in the process of — what else? — running ballot initiatives to enact new protections for direct democracy. The rest of us can join and support those organizations, sign their petitions and volunteer to help their efforts.

As Arkansas’ state Latin motto says, “the people rule.” And our elected representatives would do well to never forget it.