The most interesting ballot measures of 2024
That you likely haven't heard about yet
What are the stakes of the 2024 election? Over the coming months, enough words to fill War and Peace a hundred times over will be written answering that question.1
But only a small fraction will focus on what I’m writing about today — ballot measures.
Ballot measures are a fascinating and, at times, incredibly consequential form of policymaking. In 2024, voters across the country won’t just be picking the next president or a new congress, in many states they will be directly deciding policies that will shape the future of housing supply, greenhouse gas emissions, and the electoral system.
Abortion rights ballot measures are unquestionably important this year and there’s been a lot of strong coverage of the issue as a result. Marijuana legalization measures will certainly generate lots of coverage as well.
But I want to single out a few ballot measures on important issues that are more likely to be neglected.
The immediate impact of some of these proposals may be a bit slow to develop, and the details might even be boring to parse out. But as we all know, that terrain of politics is exactly where some of the most consequential decisions are made.
A cross-roads for ranked choice voting
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is a process that lets voters rank candidates by preference. If no one wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed until a victor is declared. It’s currently used in 64 jurisdictions around the country and Alaska and Maine are the only two states that use it statewide.
This year, voters in Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada2 will decide if RCV continues its expansion or if it remains a fringe voting process that is only used widely across two somewhat politically heterodox states.
The most straightforward proposal under consideration is in Oregon, where voters will decide on switching from the current plurality voting system to RCV for all state executive and federal elections. Idaho and Nevada are also evaluating a transition to ranked choice voting. But those states will establish new open primaries to reduce the slate of candidates to four and five respectively. Once the general election arrives, ranked choice voting will then be employed to determine the winner.
RCV superfans argue that ranked choice voting will encourage all sorts of positive behavior, from increased turnout and candidate participation (ranked votes will no longer be wasted, just passed to the second choice candidate) to the selection of more moderate candidates (the winner must ultimately earn the support of the majority of the electorate).
RCV is almost definitely a better way of voting than the plurality winner-take-all approach that is commonly used across the country. But the extent to which these benefits are real is disputed, and one unsurprising drawback is that wholly swapping voting methods can sow confusion within the electorate. A study by the MIT Election Data Science Lab found that in Maine, RCV “produced significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use. It also increased the perception that the voting process was slanted against the respondent’s party.”
That said, Maine voters seem pretty satisfied with ranked choice. But Alaska voters are considering repealing their ranked choice system, just four years after a ballot measure passed by less than 4,000 votes. Ranked choice voting helped, to varying degrees, moderate Democrat Mary Peltola and moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski beat their more extreme opponents in 2022. And for this reason, Alaska hard-liners see ranked choice voting as an existential threat to their politics.
The Republican Party chair in Idaho, similarly, called RCV “a pernicious plot to take away your ability to vote for conservative lawmakers.” But not all opposition is from the right. In the bluer state of Nevada, Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen says she’s concerned RCV could “…make casting a ballot more confusing and time-consuming.”
Will California make rent control happen?
The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act makes it impossible for cities and counties in California to impose rent control on any housing built after 1995. In 2018, voters rejected a ballot initiative that would’ve overturned the law. In 2020, voters rejected it again. And in 2024, they’ll be voting on it for a third time!
It should be noted that California does already have a law that limits allowable rent increases to 10 percent or 5 percent plus inflation, depending on which is lower for housing built before 1995. And cities like San Jose and Los Angeles have even more strict laws that limit allowable rent raises.
But as any economist or Slow Boring writer will say, rent control is a great way to disincentivize new housing construction. And NIMBYs frequently support it under the guise of supporting low-income renters but actually hope that it just makes it harder to build new housing.
In Huntington Beach, a Republican councilman made that subtext explicit. He supports overturning Costa-Hawkins because it will allow the city to slap new multi-family apartment buildings with steep rent control requirements. In practice, this means the city can refuse statewide orders to build more housing and ultimately ensure that new construction doesn’t “destroy the fabric” of the town.
So why is it that California, a state with a housing shortage of 3.5 million units, continues to put rent control on the ballot?
A huge part of the answer is Michael Weinstein, the “polarizing nonprofit honcho” who heads the AIDS Healthcare Foundation — a tax-exempt nonprofit that operates healthcare clinics and pharmacies around the world. According to Politico, Weinstein has used his position at the foundation to channel over $100 million of the organization’s profits toward his favored political causes, the largest of which is rent control.
This includes tactics such as paying people two dollars to sign his letter to Governor Newsom, urging support for his affordable housing initiatives. Or, in this case, spending nearly $11 million backing “Justice for Renters,” the committee sponsoring the ballot measure to overturn Costa-Hawkins.
Weinstein has a track record of spending millions of dollars on ballot measures that lose. So odds are that California won’t have to worry about slapping new constraints on its housing supply. But rents continue to soar, and rent control seems to be enjoying a boost of legitimacy on the national stage, so this one is worth watching.
Washington’s “Cap and Invest” program is facing backlash
Washington’s politics are fascinating. It features extremely progressive liberal enclaves like Seattle and eastern rural areas that vote ruby red. So while Governor Jay Inslee ran a presidential campaign entirely focused on climate change, his ambitious carbon-cutting agenda has been occasionally sidetracked by political reality.
Hence November’s push to repeal the state’s recently enacted “Cap and Invest” program. Similar to the more commonly known cap and trade program, this law sets annual emission caps for state carbon emitters and then allows them to buy and trade allowances for carbon emissions at state auctions. All the tax dollars raised through the program ($1.82 billion in 2023) are then invested in jobs and programs aimed at fighting climate change.
Despite assurances that the personal financial impact would be minimal, energy companies have still been passing on the costs to consumers. Analysts say the program has increased gas prices by 25 cents a gallon. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, are upset. And a bloc of the state’s swing voters are souring on the law as well.
This is a great case study in climate cognitive dissonance. Most voters profess concern about climate change, but are in practice unwilling to incur any financial cost to support policies that will help mitigate it.
It’s very possible we’ll see that mindset in action at the ballot box this November. The repeal campaign has outspent the law's proponents by a two-to-one margin. And Washington voters have a history of voting down similar climate policies. In 2018, they rejected a ballot measure that would’ve enacted a statewide carbon tax.
Other ballot measures to keep your eye on
In the aggregate, there are 136 ballot measures currently slated for 2024. Most of them will scarcely make headlines in their own state (I.E. Indiana is voting to remove their superintendent of public instruction from 6th in line for gubernatorial succession).
But here are a few more important ballot measures to watch out for:
Republicans in Florida want to make their school board elections partisan.
California is voting to increase its state minimum wage to $18 per hour by 2026, which would make it the highest in the nation.
California might change certain drug crimes from misdemeanors to a newly classified “treatment-mandated” felony and increase retail theft penalties.
Mississippi will likely become the only state left in the country that has a full sales tax on groceries because South Dakota is looking to get rid of its own.
The 2024 presidential election is a consequential and anxiety-inducing affair. But these ballot measures should serve as a reminder that the stakes don’t stop at the top of the ticket.
Someone is more than welcome to fact check the actual math of that statement in the comment section below!
Missouri is also considering a measure to ban it from being used anywhere in the state.
One thing I’ll note about the Missouri ballot initiative: it doesn’t just get rid of RCV. It also requires primaries only put one candidate forward. The reason that’s important is because St. Louis City has already implemented what is, in my view, a superior alternative to RCV with an approval primary followed by a runoff. The legislature wants to get rid of all of these alternative voting forms because I suppose they like extreme candidates plus they hate whenever a major city does something nice for itself.
Probably worth mentioning that CA also has a measure on the ballot (Prop 34) to stop AIDS Healthcare Foundation from doing any more ballot measures in the future.