Abortion Rights Have Won Every Ballot Measure Since Dobbs. Legislatures Are Rewriting the Rules to Stop That.

Voters Keep Winning. Legislatures Keep Fighting Back.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion-rights ballot measures have gone 7 for 7. Kansas, Michigan, California, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio all voted to protect reproductive rights.

In each state, the pro-abortion-rights side outperformed the Democratic candidate on the same ballot. These measures win even when Democrats lose because the issue crosses party lines.

Florida proved the threat that record poses. In November 2024, 57% of Florida voters supported an abortion rights amendment. It failed because Florida requires 60% to pass constitutional amendments.

A clear majority of voters wanted it. The rules said that was not enough.

7 for 7. Abortion-rights measures have won every time voters decided them since Dobbs. The one loss, in Florida, got 57% support but failed a 60% supermajority threshold.

The Campaign to Kill Direct Democracy

State legislatures passed 45 bills restricting ballot initiatives in 2023 alone, more than the previous five years combined. In 2024, 14 more bills made the initiative process harder. By mid-2025, 51 bills had already passed state houses, exceeding the annual average of 34.

South Dakota has passed 11 laws restricting ballot access since 2018. The state now has a 2026 ballot measure proposing a 60% supermajority requirement for all citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. North Dakota has a similar measure.

Missouri’s Amendment 4 goes further, requiring majority approval in all eight congressional districts separately. Every citizen-initiated amendment since 2020 would have failed under that rule.

The pattern is clear. When voters use ballot measures to override the legislature, the legislature rewrites the rules for ballot measures.

What Is on the Ballot in 2026

The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center tracks 452 measures nationwide, with 97 certified for the 2026 ballot as of April.

Abortion. Nevada’s Question 6 needs a second vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. Virginia has a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access through the second trimester. Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and Oregon have proposed measures at various stages of qualification. Missouri’s legislature placed a repeal of the 2024 abortion amendment on the ballot.

Direct democracy itself. Missouri (district-by-district approval), South Dakota (60% threshold), and North Dakota (60% threshold) all have measures that would make future citizen initiatives functionally impossible to pass.

Voting and elections. Multiple states have measures on redistricting rules and voter ID. Stateline reports that ballots are becoming battlegrounds for the machinery of elections themselves.

Why Ballot Measures Outperform Candidates

Ballot measures strip away partisanship. A voter who always votes Republican can still vote yes on abortion rights or Medicaid expansion without abandoning their party. That is exactly what happened in Kansas in 2022, where the abortion measure outperformed the Democratic governor candidate in deep-red counties. Ohio followed the same pattern in 2023.

This is why legislatures target the process. They cannot win the argument on the merits, so they raise the threshold and shorten signature windows. They impose geographic distribution requirements that give rural districts veto power over statewide majorities.

What you can do now

Check what is on your ballot. Go to Ballotpedia’s 2026 ballot measures page and search your state. Know every measure you will vote on before you get to the polling place.
Watch for threshold measures disguised as reform. Supermajority requirements are often marketed as protecting the constitution from “special interests.” Read the actual text. If a measure raises the threshold above 50%, it means a minority of voters can override the majority.
Support signature collection for measures you believe in. Ballot measures live or die during the qualification phase, months before the election. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center tracks which measures need signatures and where.
Vote on every measure, not just the top of the ticket. Ballot measures appear at the bottom. Undervoting is highest on these questions. In low-turnout midterms, the voters who show up for every line on the ballot are the ones who decide policy.

Update, June 12, 2026: Missouri courts have rewritten or rejected official ballot summaries eight times since Secretary of State Denny Hoskins took office, according to the Missouri Independent. Five of those rewrites involved language written by Hoskins; three involved summaries drafted by Republican lawmakers for proposed constitutional amendments. Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green, a Republican, found that a legislative summary for a proposed abortion ban failed to disclose it would repeal the abortion-rights amendment Missouri voters approved in 2024.

The Western District Court of Appeals separately rewrote the summary for Amendment 5, Gov. Mike Kehoe’s tax overhaul, ruling it did not inform voters the measure would authorize expanded sales and use taxes and curtail existing constitutional limits on taxation. Voters will decide Amendment 5 on Aug. 4. Derek Clinger, senior counsel for the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told the Independent that Missouri “has probably been the hottest spot” nationally for these conflicts in recent years.

Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, whose office defends ballot summaries in court, said the Western District has “predictably approved edits to every ballot title it has considered” over the past year. Hoskins argued the rewrites amount to judges “legislating from the bench,” a framing the courts have rejected in their rulings.

Update, July 14, 2026: Voters in North Dakota and South Dakota will decide this November whether to raise their state constitutional amendment approval threshold from a simple majority to 60%, and Utah will consider a similar measure restricted to tax-related proposals, according to NPR Politics. Of the 26 states that allow citizen-initiated ballot measures, only Florida currently requires the 60% threshold.

Missouri voters will weigh Amendment 4 in the August primary, which would require any citizen-initiated constitutional amendment to pass in each of the state’s congressional districts. The higher bar would not apply to legislature-referred measures, which would still require only a statewide majority. Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, told NPR that the defining political contest of 2026 is “the battle over direct democracy availability itself.”

Florida’s 60% rule blocked a 2024 abortion rights amendment that won 57% of the statewide vote. Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said raising vote thresholds is the “antithesis of democracy.” Zebadiah Johnson of the Voter Defense Association of South Dakota noted that since 2002, only 15 of 37 proposed amendments in that state have cleared even the simple majority threshold.