New year, same bullshit: Lawmakers are trying to block the will of the people on abortion access.
This week, Idaho Republicans introduced a bill to raise the voting threshold for ballot initiatives and referendums from a simple majority to 60%. In what we're sure is totally unrelated news, Idaho pro-choice advocates are working to get an abortion amendment on the ballot in 2026.
State Rep. Bruce Skaug (R) introduced the proposal, House Bill 2, and it has 11 co-sponsors in the House and Senate. The House State Affairs Committee voted to move the bill forward on Wednesday, meaning it will get a public hearing at some point in the future.
Rep. Skaug claimed to the committee that Idaho’s citizen-led initiative process was "broken" and influenced by out-of-state money. "Millions of dollars, coming into our state to affect and change what we as a Legislature would have done as representatives of the people," he said, adding, "This is one way to level the playing field a little bit by raising it to 60%." Gerrymandered legislatures aren't representative of the people, and Skaug just seems mad that the people have a tactic to fight back. Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Todd Achilles said Wednesday that the bill was hard to justify. “We’re putting a 60% threshold on citizens, on Idaho citizens, when we as legislators only have a 50% threshold,” he said.
Idaho has a devastating abortion ban that has no exceptions for threats to patient health—the procedure is allowed only if someone is on the brink of death. That means, as Idaho's lawyers recently argued in federal court, if a pregnant woman has a sepsis infection so dire that doctors say she needs an abortion to prevent a limb amputation, she can't have one. It's led to patients being flown out of state on medical helicopters. As the Idaho Capital Sun reports, "During a four-month span when the Supreme Court was weighing the case, doctors in Idaho airlifted six patients to neighboring states for maternal complications rather than risk prosecution. A year earlier, only one needed to be airlifted." (The Supreme Court said in June that Idaho hospitals could offer abortions in health emergencies for the time being, but the incoming Trump administration is likely to drop the Justice Department lawsuit against the state and change federal guidance about emergency room care.)
A group called Idahoans United for Women and Families is organizing to put an abortion measure to voters in the November 2026 midterm elections. They submitted four ballot text proposals to the state in August: Three would enshrine in the state constitution a right to abortion at various stages of pregnancy at or after 20 weeks, while the fourth only adds exceptions to the current ban. The group will pick one and expects to start gathering signatures in the coming weeks.
Recall that, despite 57% of Floridians voting for an abortion ballot measure in November, the initiative ultimately failed because of a 60% threshold enshrined in 2006. (We must note that the change to the initiative process didn’t even hit 60% support—it only got 58%.) Ohio Republicans tried and failed to pull this move in 2023 ahead of an abortion amendment, and Issue 1 passed that fall with 57% support. Perhaps now you can see why conservatives are stuck on the three-fifths benchmark. After the Ohio amendment passed, anti-abortion group Americans United for Life called for states to end citizen-led initiatives altogether and require referrals from state legislatures.
Raising amendment thresholds can undermine progress on all kinds of issues, which is why conservative lawmakers have embraced the tactic—including on abortion.
