Ballot initiatives put power to the people

A trio of citizen-led initiates appear to be headed for the November ballot, despite state Republicans’ best efforts to obstruct the process and ultimately muzzle voters. 

Constitutional Initiatives 126 and 127 seek to change how elections are held in Montana, moving to a top-four open primary system and requiring candidates to win a majority of votes in a general election. Constitutional Initiative 128, meanwhile, would enshrine the right to have an abortion in Montana up to the point of fetal viability, along with establishing protections for medical providers. 

Each of the initiatives surpassed the signature gathering threshold to go before voters, according to last week’s official tally by Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican. 

But the outcome didn’t come without a legal labyrinth.

In June, as signatures were being tallied, Jacobsen without notice changed election software to toss out “inactive” voters -- usually those who have not voted in consecutive federal elections -- which differed from Montana’s typical signature verification process.  

Initiative supporters filed a lawsuit against the state after they discovered the rules were changed mid-count, and last week a state district court judge ruled in their favor, saying that deleting signatures from inactive voters infringed on the right to participate in government. 

Jacobsen’s apparent sleight of hand was also concerning to the judge.

“I think the troubling component here is the process was underway and the secretary of state, in the middle of this process by which the signatures on the petitions were being considered by the county, that the secretary of state then changed their program to do something entirely different [from the process of] what sounds to be, like, three decades,” Lewis and Clark Judge Mike Menahan said. 

The state Supreme Court last week unanimously rejected Jacobsen’s request to intervene. 

Meanwhile, another group of Republicans including House Speaker Matt Regier, filed a separate suit that argued Jacobsen should be prohibited from certifying two of the initiatives because she failed to toss out the inactive voters. 

REGARDLESS OF where you stand on the issues raised by these ballot questions, the partisan effort to obstruct the petition process through sneaky rule changes should raise the ire of all voters who support Montana’s right to direct democracy. 

The use of ballot measures was authorized in Montana in 1906, making it the seventh state in the union to support the process. 

Even Founding Father and President James Madison advocated for referendums in his Federalist essays. 

“As the people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived, it seems strictly consonant to the republican theory to recur to the same original authority ... whenever it may be necessary to enlarge, diminish, or new-model the powers of government,” he wrote. 

Quite simply, ballot questions are a populist approach to governance that put power to the people. 

The courts are right to snuff out any underhanded attempt to take that away.