Voters across 41 states will decide more than 150 ballot measures in November, dealing with everything from how elections are run and who gets paid sick leave to banning trophy hunting and cracking down on retail theft.
Taken together, the measures have the potential to reshape state policy on key issues nationwide — as evidenced over the last decade by the wildly successful movements to expand health care coverage and legalize marijuana at the ballot box.
The wide range of measures going before voters this year took different paths to the ballot: Some were citizen initiatives, meaning supporters of those measures gathered tens of thousands of signatures to secure a place on the ballot; others were passed and referred to the ballot by state legislatures.
And in some states, particularly those led by Republicans, voters will consider constitutional amendments that would make it harder to engage in direct democracy through ballot measures.
Issue groups that have used ballot campaigns to bypass unfriendly legislatures are increasingly focused on protecting the process itself. Matthew Schweich, executive director of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, is launching the Voter Defense Association, an organization committed to defeating efforts to place barriers around direct democracy.
“What we’re seeing right now is what has become the norm: A steady stream of legislatively referred ballot questions to restrict the ballot initiative process,” Schweich said.
While abortion referendums have garnered the most attention, voters will be weighing in on dozens of other issues in November. Here are some of the biggest — and most contentious — topics that are showing up across multiple states:
Elections
Some of this year’s most fiercely fought ballot battles address who votes and how. Proposals related to ranked choice voting, open primaries, redistricting and other election-related issues are appearing on more than a dozen ballots across the country.
“What’s notable this year is a very significant number of election-related ballot measures,” the most in at least a decade, said Helen Brewer, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures focusing on ballot measures.
Ranked choice voting, in which voters list their preferences for candidates and the votes of the lowest-performing hopefuls get reallocated until one candidate reaches a majority, has been billed as a way to reduce polarization and produce less extreme candidates. But it’s also faced criticism from conservatives who say it lacks transparency and disenfranchises voters by discounting their first-choice candidates. Voters will consider proposals both to expand and curtail the system’s use this fall.
Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, D.C., all have proposals on November’s ballot that would implement ranked choice voting. The measures in Colorado, Idaho and Nevada would also replace partisan primaries with open contests in which the top vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party.
Voters in Alaska, meanwhile, one of two states that currently uses ranked choice voting, will decide in November whether to repeal the system, as well as the state’s top-four open primaries. Missouri’s ballot, too, will contain a measure that would explicitly ban ranked choice voting.
Two other states, Arizona and Montana, will vote on proposals that may eventually lead to the use of ranked choice voting in some form. In Arizona, Proposition 140 would switch the state to open primaries, and depending on how many candidates make it to the general election could determine the winner based on ranked choice provisions. Montana’s constitutional amendment would require candidates for statewide and federal offices to garner a majority of votes to win.
Another common topic: voting rights for noncitizens. Eight states — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — will vote on constitutional amendments that would explicitly ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Federal law already prohibits this practice, but a handful of cities across the country do allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. This year’s crop of measures — all placed on the ballot by Republican-led legislatures — comes as Republicans in Congress have pushed a national law banning noncitizen voting.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters this spring when asked to explain why the law was necessary. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”
Partisan politics: An Ohio constitutional amendment to shift redistricting responsibilities from the state Legislature to an independent, nonpartisan committee has already broken fundraising records for similar measures: As of late July, progressive-leaning groups and unions had poured nearly $27 million into the campaign supporting the effort.
Florida voters will weigh in on whether school board elections should be partisan going forward. The proposal comes amid growing — but questionably effective — efforts by conservatives, led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the group Moms for Liberty, to take over school boards across the state.
Minimum wage & economic policy
In a year where voters in both parties name inflation and high prices as a top concern, voters will consider measures related to the minimum wage and paid sick leave in half a dozen states in November.
Taking economic issues to the ballot has long been a strategy favored by progressive groups that struggle to get such reforms passed in highly partisan environments.
In Alaska and Missouri, proposed ballot measures would gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour and require companies to provide paid sick leave. The minimum wage in Alaska is currently $11.73 per hour; the ballot measure would hike it to $15 by July 1, 2027, and also require employers to allow workers to accrue up to either 40 or 56 hours of paid sick leave (depending on the size of the company).
In Missouri, the minimum wage is currently $12.30 per hour, and would hit $15 per hour in 2026. This fall’s ballot measure would also require employers to provide an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours an employee works.
“The simple matter is that $492 a week isn’t enough to live in any county in the state of Missouri,” Richard Von Glahn, the campaign manager for Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages, told POLITICO. “We’ve seen things about rising prices and supply chain disruption, and workers are feeling that pinch.”
An initiative to raise the statewide minimum wage in California from $16 to $18 per hour has seen a remarkably subdued campaign thus far. Tech billionaire Joe Sanberg spent millions to qualify the initiative for the ballot but has indicated he’s not planning to fund a general election campaign for it, banking on what he describes as the proposal’s inherent appeal to voters.
Since California already has sector-specific minimum wage requirements in place for many key industries that are higher than $18 per hour, like health care workers and fast food employees, some have argued the California proposal is obsolete.
Two other states, Arizona and Massachusetts, will vote on proposals related to the minimum wage for tipped workers. The tipped wage in Massachusetts is currently $6.75 per hour plus tips, and this fall’s proposal would gradually raise it to $15 per hour by Jan. 1, 2029.
Arizona’s proposal would allow employers to pay tipped workers 25 percent less than the minimum wage of $14.35 per hour as long as the employee receives a certain amount in tips. This would slightly decrease the minimum wage for tipped employees, which is currently $11.35.
In Nebraska, voters will weigh in on whether to require companies to offer paid sick leave for all employees, with small companies required to offer up to five days of leave and larger ones to offer seven days of leave.
Cannabis/drug policy
Many states have already loosened their policies toward marijuana and other drugs via ballot measures, and this year will see a handful of additional proposals.
Five states — Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — will vote on whether to legalize marijuana or further loosen restrictions on the drug.
Florida’s measure, which would legalize the drug for adult use, has gotten attention in the presidential race since former President Donald Trump announced he would be voting for it .
Voters in North Dakota and South Dakota will vote on whether to legalize marijuana use for adults — and in both states, it’s the third time the issue has been on the ballot in recent years.
North Dakota legalized medical marijuana via ballot measure in 2016 but rejected efforts to legalize recreational marijuana in both 2018 and 2022.
In South Dakota, this will be the third consecutive election with marijuana on the ballot: Voters passed a measure legalizing its recreational use in 2020, but the state Supreme Court ruled that proposal was unconstitutional. A similar measure failed at the ballot box in 2022.
Nebraska, meanwhile, is voting on whether to legalize medical marijuana, and Arkansas will decide whether to further loosen restrictions on medical marijuana, which voters legalized via ballot measure in 2016.
“With regard to cannabis reform, the ballot initiative process was instrumental in turning popular opinion into public policy,” said Schweich, of the Marijuana Policy Project, adding that he thinks there’s a good chance all five of those measures will pass.
And in Massachusetts, psychedelics are on the ballot: The state’s Question 4 would allow the personal use of certain amounts of psychedelic substances and create a commission to tax and regulate them.
Same-sex marriage
Nearly a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, three states are voting on whether to remove dormant language from their state constitutions that limit marriage to a man and a woman.
The trio of amendments in California, Colorado and Hawaii are an effort to insulate states against any potential rollback of same-sex marriage rights by a conservative Supreme Court, said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
Those worries increased after Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion in his concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs abortion ruling that the Court “should reconsider” its past rulings on issues like marriage and contraception.
“That language made people say, ‘OK, they’ve said the quiet part out loud,” Figueredo told POLITICO. “So now LGBTQ+ rights organizations are trying to get out ahead of what could eventually happen.”
Ballot reversal: California’s Prop 3 will remove a sentence banning same-sex marriage added to the state constitution by the 2008 amendment that came before voters as as Prop 8.
Repealing that language is a symbolic effort that LGBTQ+ activists see as a test drive for their ability to organize against potential future efforts to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, including for transgender individuals.
Other measures
Other high-stakes ballot conflict touches on everything from crime and immigration to hunting and funding for private schools. There are also efforts, mainly on the part of Republican-led state legislatures, to put new restrictions on the use of ballot measures themselves.
California, where the issues of retail theft and drug addiction have garnered growing attention in recent years, will vote on a proposal to strengthen penalties for some theft and drug crimes.
Prop 36, backed by a coalition of prosecutors and qualified for the ballot with the help of big-box retailers like Target and Walmart, would roll back parts of Prop 47 , a 2014 ballot measure that downgraded many theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
This year’s measure, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and top statewide Democrats oppose , is drawing support from law enforcement and Republican lawmakers. But it’s also backed by some big-city Democratic mayors — including San Francisco’s London Breed and San Jose’s Matt Mahan — and is the most visible issue on the California ballot this fall.
Immigration: In Arizona, a ballot measure proposed by the GOP-led state Legislature would make it illegal to enter the state from a foreign country anywhere other than an official port of entry, a proposal targeted at illegal border crossings from Mexico. The measure resembles Texas’s hard-line law, which caused chaos and confusion at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year. A federal appeals court eventually put the law on hold .
Colorado voters will decide whether to ban trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats and lynxes. If they do, it will make Colorado just the second state to prohibit the practice at the ballot box: Voters in California approved a measure banning the killing of mountain lions for sport in 1990.
Education issues are on the ballot, as well: Public school advocates in Nebraska qualified a measure that would repeal a law allowing taxpayer money to be used for private school tuition. Expanding K-12 vouchers has become a top education priority for Republicans across the country.
And some proposals on the ballot this fall target the use of ballot measures themselves — a push that comes on the heels of efforts to block or remove some of this year’s abortion-related measures from state ballots.
In Utah, the Republican-led state legislature placed a measure on this November’s ballot that would give them the power to amend or even revoke initiatives once voters have approved them. North Dakotans will vote on a measure that would require an initiative to pass in both a primary and a general election before taking effect, and Arizona will consider a measure that would introduce new signature-gathering requirements.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated which state will vote on a measure related to ballot initiative reform.
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