While the pivotal 2022 election contests to determine which party controls the Senate, House, and state governments dominate the headlines, voters in many states and communities across the country will also decide measures affecting critical issues directly on their ballots. Daily Kos Elections has created a guide to 102 noteworthy ballot measures on a variety of topics, including some placed on the ballot directly by voters and others advanced by legislators. You can also find tables below summarizing all of them.
These measures cover matters such as abortion, health care, labor, housing, taxes, criminal justice, civil rights, voting rights, and even the structure of our democracy. Examples include measures related to abortion rights in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont; marijuana legalization in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota; minimum wage increases in Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington, D.C.; and Republican attempts to make future ballot initiatives harder in Arizona and Arkansas—precisely because progressive reformers have had such success in using initiatives to overcome obstinate state lawmakers.
In key part because Republicans in Congress and in many state legislatures have thwarted the adoption of policies benefiting everyday Americans, ballot measures have become a critical tool for enacting meaningful change. That's particularly true for initiatives protecting our democracy from Republican efforts to entrench themselves in power through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and attacks on the integrity of our election system, which is why we’ve devoted a separate piece to cataloguing measures specifically related to democracy.
For additional information on these ballot measures and others, check out Ballotpedia as well as this cheat sheet from Bolts' Daniel Nichanian.
