Voters supported progressive policies on ballot initiatives. Now Republicans are pushing back.

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After Idaho Medicaid expansion received resounding support at the ballot box in 2018 along with funding for education, the Republican Legislature began pushing to make future ballot initiatives more difficult. Instead of requiring organizers gather a percentage of signatures from 18 of the state’s legislative districts, the GOP lawmakers passed a law that required them to gather signatures from all of the state’s 35 districts.

That means that future organizers will have to travel to far-flung sections of the rural state, potentially increasing costs of any ballot initiative by millions of dollars for a process that most idealize as a grassroots one. Local organizing groups have complained it makes a ballot initiative nearly impossible.

Jim Jones is currently challenging that law in court with his group, Committee to Protect and Preserve the Idaho Constitution. A former Republican state attorney general and the chief justice of the state supreme court, Jones said he no longer identifies with his party, and it’s not just Idaho’s Republican-led legislature that is limiting direct democracy efforts.

“We've looked at what has been happening in other states, and they're generally red states, where very right-wing legislators have pretty much captured the majority or command a majority,” Jones said. “They’ve essentially — not just here in Idaho but in other states, too — attempted to make the initiative process inoperable, so that people don’t have a way of getting around a recalcitrant legislature.”

More: NBC News

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