How Partisan Gerrymandering Limits Access to Direct Democracy

jump to:

Gerrymandered legislatures target direct democracy measures across Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, Utah, and Ohio.

In states across the country, legislatures that have gained power through gerrymandering have sought to attack a key tool voters still have for democratic accountability and action: direct democracy. Direct democracy differs by state, but in many states, voters have the opportunity to directly put measures on the ballot to repeal legislation or propose constitutional amendments, usually through petition measures. After drawing distorted maps that entrench their control and silence fair representation, these same lawmakers are working to strip citizens of the right to shape their own laws. The result is a dangerous feedback loop of unearned power without accountability. 

In such states as Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, Utah, and Ohio, voters face escalating barriers to ballot initiatives and referendums—the very tools designed to keep the government responsive to the people. These restrictions are not isolated policy choices. They are part of a broader, coordinated effort to shut voters out of the democratic process and shield politicians from the will of the people. And all are enabled by a gerrymandered legislature.

Gerrymandering enables legislatures to be unaccountable to their voters, incentivizing them to attempt to block voters’ ability to make decisions for themselves, including through ballot measures. 

Gerrymandering is not just a technical manipulation of district lines. It is a deliberate act to subvert democracy. By “packing” and “cracking” communities, partisan map drawers silence millions of voters by diluting their voices and warping representation to keep power in the hands of a few. Lines can be manipulated on racial and partisan lines, to ensure that communities’ collective voice never translates into fair representation. 

The consequences of this are profound. Gerrymandered legislatures are more polarized, less competitive, and far less responsive to the voters they are supposed to serve. They act with greater impunity in passing extremist policies, such as strict abortion bans that defy public opinion, because they know their districts will protect them from electoral backlash. 

Gerrymandering’s effects can be seen both on a map and in the data. Misshapen districts carve up cities and communities that make no geographic or civic sense. Metrics, including the Efficiency Gap and Partisan Bias, can often quantify these distortions, showing how one party’s votes can be systematically wasted through packing and cracking, while the other party’s votes are amplified. While no individual metric can capture all aspects of manipulation, and the effectiveness of any individual measurement can vary depending on the state, the policy outcomes are nonetheless stark and measurable. The result is legislators who represent the powerful few instead of the majority views of their constituents. 

In this climate, direct democracy through ballot initiatives and referendums has become a vital safeguard in states where those tools are available. When lawmakers refuse to listen, citizens are still able to make their voices heard, protecting fundamental rights like voting rights, reproductive freedom, and more. Recognizing the threat direct democracy could pose to their complete and unearned power, many manipulated legislatures are now targeting these mechanisms. By raising passage thresholds, criminalizing petition drives, and burying grassroots movements in red tape, they are silencing what in many states is the last remaining path for voters to lift their voices and have a say. 

In Florida, new laws imposing criminal penalties for minor mistakes have delayed grassroots efforts supporting constitutional amendments and incurred exorbitant costs.

Florida

Florida’s constitution explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering, yet under pressure from Governor Ron DeSantis, the legislature drew maps that handed Republicans a built-in advantage of 10% in the state Senate and 8% in the state House, as measured by the partisan bias metric.1 Despite voters’ clear demand for fairness, partisan manipulation prevailed.

In the aftermath, Republican lawmakers doubled down by attacking direct democracy. Through a series of omnibus bills, legislators sought to make it nearly impossible for citizens to propose or pass constitutional amendments. One such measure, HB 1205, which became law in May 2025, imposes exorbitant costs and punitive penalties on grassroots campaigns. It forces citizen groups to bear the cost of verifying signatures, limits signature gathering to resident citizens, and threatens volunteers with criminal penalties for minor paperwork errors.2 These provisions, which are now being challenged in federal court, aim to silence Floridians’ voices. Such provisions often intimidate grassroots organizations, and at a minimum will lead to significant compliance costs for any effort to be mounted. Past ballot initiative campaigns, prior to the restriction, already cost over $125 million.3 Under these new regulations, costs will rise substantially. In all, such attacks on people’s voices make proposing direct reform a privilege of the wealthy and well-connected. 

The impact of this attack on direct democracy is already being felt. Multiple grassroots campaigns have paused or delayed signature drives. The campaign to expand Medicaid in Florida has postponed efforts towards the 2026 ballot to 2028, citing the new limits and legal uncertainty created by HB 1205.4 For the 2026 elections, elections officials have announced that not a single citizen-initiated measure managed to make it on the ballot—just as advocates had warned would happen.5

In Arkansas, canvassing and petitioning for ballot measures was made much more burdensome for citizens seeking to participate.

Arkansas

Arkansas’s legislature has created one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the nation, locking in a significant Republican advantage, with a massive partisan bias score indicating that Republicans would receive over 13% in unearned seats in a hypothetical, perfectly tied election in the state senate, and 12% in the state House.6 Through a package of bills, the lopsided legislature weaponized bureaucracy to intimidate voters and volunteers.7 Many such bills took effect in 2025. The laws force canvassers to deliver intimidating warnings about “petition fraud,” demand photo IDs from signers, and file burdensome affidavits before signatures can be counted.8 

Many of the new measures were challenged in court, and in November 2025, a federal court preliminarily enjoined many of the provisions, as applied to plaintiffs engaged in current petition efforts, as likely violations of the First Amendment.9 While courts continue to consider the laws’ constitutionality, the intent of the laws is undeniable: to discourage citizens from participating in direct democracy actions, suppress grassroots petition drives, and ensure that fewer measures ever make it onto the ballot. Arkansas’s legislative leaders are deliberately trying to stop people from engaging in the democratic process—a direct assault on direct democracy and voter empowerment.

In South Dakota, lawmakers have repeatedly tried to raise the threshold to pass citizen-initiated constitutional amendments, which if passed, would limit voters’ power to shape their laws through ballot initiatives. 

South Dakota

South Dakota’s maps, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, skew heavily toward Republican control, with an 8% efficiency gap in the state Senate and 13% in the state House.10 Republican lawmakers in the state recently proposed a state constitutional amendment, which will be voted on in 2026, which if passed would raise the approval threshold for constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. This procedural change would have sweeping consequences, effectively stripping citizens of their ability to shape their own constitution. 

The 2026 proposed measure is bad—but also illustrative of a larger pattern of a legislature that is disconnected from voters’ interests and has repeatedly attacked the power of the initiative. South Dakota voters previously weighed in on two very similar amendments that would have created supermajority requirements—Amendment C in 2022, and Amendment X in 2018. Both amendments were rejected by voters.11 Yet, the legislature has proposed yet another amendment for the 2026 ballot.

Opponents of the new scheme warn that the proposed change would actually empower out-of-state interest groups, rather than weaken them.12 Furthermore, raising the threshold would make it virtually impossible for grassroots campaigns to succeed, effectively consolidating legislative power and undermining the will of the people in one of the few remaining spaces where they can still make their voices heard.

In Utah, legislators have attempted to undermine past reforms and cut off avenues for future reform.

Utah

Utah’s legislative maps lock in a Republican advantage of 9% in both state legislative chambers based on the partisan bias metric and waste Democratic votes at a 7% higher rate than Republicans as measured by the efficiency gap, making it 82% more skewed than other states’ maps.13 This partisan imbalance has enabled the legislature to attempt to further restrict the people’s power.

In March 2020, the Utah Legislature repealed Proposition 4 (Prop 4), a voter-enacted redistricting reform initiative passed in 2018 that created an independent redistricting commission, imposing procedural and substantive safeguards on the map-drawing process. This effectively restored legislative control over redistricting, and in November 2021, the legislature drew its own congressional map, outside of the Prop 4 process approved by the voters. A case challenging the legislature’s map, League of Women Voters of Utah v. Utah State Legislature, was filed in 2022 on behalf of voters that argued the repeal and resulting map violated the state constitution and statutory standards.14 In July 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the legislature cannot undermine voter-enacted redistricting reform, and remanded the case back to the district court. 

In the wake of the court’s ruling in favor of initiative rights that empowered voters, the legislature responded by restricting the process. Lawmakers passed SJR 2 in March 2025, which proposes a constitutional amendment to be voted on in the November 2026 elections. If passed, the measure would raise the approval threshold for any citizen-initiated tax measure to 60%, effectively closing off this avenue of policymaking for voters.15 The legislature also passed SB 73 the same month, which would make the process for citizens to start initiatives even more burdensome by imposing new publication mandates and funding disclosure rules. Such rules would inflate the cost of ballot initiatives by $1.4 million.16 

Despite this legislative maneuvering, the map challenge case continued. On remand in August 2025, the district court held in favor of the voters, rolling back the unconstitutional repeal bill and reenacting the voters’ will through Prop 4. The partisan gerrymandered map was overturned; the court adopted a congressional map for use in the 2026 elections proposed by the plaintiffs that complies with the reinstated Prop 4 requirements. Even so, partisans in the legislature continued to pursue all avenues to disrupt enforcement of the people’s will, going so far as to threaten to impeach the district judge who struck down the unconstitutional map. Even after the deadline the defendants themselves set for maps to be in place for the 2026 elections, they continued to challenge the district court’s ruling, including, in a special session, adjusting election deadlines to give a theoretical legal appeal additional time ahead of the 2026 elections.

Barring any last-minute changes, the state’s congressional map will be fair for the first time this decade, but the 60% threshold measure will be on the 2026 general election ballot—meaning the legislature’s efforts to insulate itself continue.

In Ohio, where legislators defied the state supreme court to protect their gerrymander, those same legislative leaders have fought tooth-and-nail to stop citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. 

Ohio

In 2023, Ohio voters successfully rejected a proposed 60% vote threshold for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments when it appeared on the ballot, in a clear rebuke by the people of any efforts to curtail direct democracy.17 Had this effort passed, just three months later, the state’s 57% vote for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing reproductive rights until viability would not have passed the proposed 60% threshold and the majority of Ohioans’ voices on this issue would have been ignored.18

Despite the rebuke from voters, legislators continued their efforts, but took aim at local initiatives instead of a statewide one. In 2025, the supermajority-Republican legislature passed a new law, HB 335, that raised the threshold to 60% for voter approval of any local laws that levy taxes.19 This measure removes the automatic property tax revenue that local governments rely on for basic resources such as emergency services and schools, and instead requires voters to approve, with over 60% of the vote, taxes to fund these vital government functions.20 Moreover, because of its local focus, the new law is in the form of a statute that does not require statewide approval from voters. The bill effectively strips voters of their current power to use majority rule at the local level. 

The lawmakers who passed this law, taking power away from voters, owe their seats to heavily skewed maps. Ohio’s legislative maps, when first drawn following the 2020 Census, were challenged in court by Ohio voters as partisan gerrymanders in violation of the state constitution, and the Ohio Supreme Court struck down five sets of state legislative maps, one after the other. Nonetheless, Ohioans received only slight improvements in their maps, and were forced to vote in 2022 under state legislative maps that had been found by the state’s highest court to be unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, based on reforms that were supported overwhelmingly by voters in 2015. But mapdrawers’ malicious disregard for the reforms and the Ohio Supreme Court’s decisions meant that the state’s maps remain gerrymandered, giving Republicans a 10% advantage in the state Senate and 7% in the state House, based on the partisan gap metric from PlanScore.21

In 2024, Ohio voters narrowly defeated a new ballot initiative designed to address deficiencies in the 2015 reform and stop partisan gerrymandering, by giving redistricting power to an independent commission of citizens. The surprising defeat of the measure, of what would otherwise have been a noncontroversial measure with broad bipartisan support, was connected to exceedingly deceptive ballot language employed by the legislature and Republican statewide leaders.22 That language claimed that a scheme for an independent, citizen-led commission to draw maps transparently—with specific requirements that banned partisan gerrymandering and racial vote dilution—would instead “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and create a state body that would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts.”23 This deceptive ballot language was unfortunately successful in confusing enough voters into supporting continued partisan gerrymandering, further entrenching and empowering elected officials to erode direct democracy. 

Across these states, a troubling pattern emerges of politicians manipulating the rules of democracy to protect their own power.

These assaults on direct democracy further deprive citizens of the tools to challenge or correct entrenched legislative overreach in states where representation has already been distorted to benefit those in power. These tactics systematically weaken democratic accountability. But democracy does not belong to those who draw the maps or rig the rules. It belongs to the voters—and their right to shape their own government must be protected. 

  1.  Florida, PlanScore (2022) [https://perma.cc/85VS-6NJ3].
    ↩︎
  2.  Jackie Mitchell, Florida enacts law changing initiative process requirements; legal challenge filed in federal court, Ballotpedia News (May 21, 2025, 10:50 AM) [https://perma.cc/2HJD-9MPC].
    ↩︎
  3.  Albert Serna Jr., State ballot measures attract more than $417 million ahead of Election Day, Open Secrets (Oct. 30, 2024, 2:32 PM) [https://perma.cc/EG9K-4XZF]. 
    ↩︎
  4.  Kate Payne, Campaign delays push to expand Medicaid in Florida until 2028, citing new state law, AP News (Sep. 25, 2025, 7:26 AM) [https://perma.cc/7RVK-CRVG]. Courts have already issued mixed rulings as advocates press in federal court. 
    ↩︎
  5.  Kate Payne, State announces no citizens’ initiatives qualified for 2026 ballot, following new law, Fla. Tributary (Feb. 2, 2026) [https://perma.cc/445U-6FM8]. 
    ↩︎
  6.  Arkansas, PlanScore (2022), https://planscore.org/arkansas/#!2022.
    ↩︎
  7.  See, e.g., Act 218 (S.B. 207), 95th Gen. Assem., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) [https://perma.cc/J2SQ-8UHZ]; Act 240 (S.B. 208), 95th Gen. Assem., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) [https://perma.cc/2RPZ-B6AY], Act 273 (S.B. 209), 95th Gen. Assem., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) [https://perma.cc/NX85-8FAP], Act 274 (S.B. 210), 95th Gen. Assem., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) [https://perma.cc/7YQL-K8N4]; Act 241 (S.B. 211) , 95th Gen. Assem., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) [https://perma.cc/Y4HZ-JC7L].
    ↩︎
  8.  Arkansas Senate, Senate Approves Package of Bills to Regulate Signature Gathering for Ballot Issues (Mar. 5, 2025) [https://perma.cc/23E9-LF7M].
    ↩︎
  9.  Memorandum Opinion, League of Women Voters of Arkansas v. Jester, ECF #50, No. 5:25-cv-05087-TLB (W.D. Ark, Nov. 19, 2025) [https://perma.cc/7CLZ-9NPH].
    ↩︎
  10.  South Dakota, PlanScore (2022) [https://perma.cc/8TDD-EYYP].
    ↩︎
  11.  See HJR 5003, 96th Sess., Reg. Sess. (N.D. 2022) [https://perma.cc/JKC8-QD65] (2022 measure proposing 60% threshold); see also South Dakota Secretary of State, 2022 Primary Election Results at *9 [https://perma.cc/927S-ZTJJ] (November 2022 election results); see also SJR 1, 93rd Sess., Reg. Sess., (N.D.  2018) [https://perma.cc/K4CC-CJZN] (proposed 2018 measure to require 55% to pass amendments); see also South Dakota Secretary of State, 2018 Primary Election Results at *39 [https://perma.cc/TRR8-EK7A] (June 2018 election results).
    ↩︎
  12.  Makenzie Huber, Raising constitutional amendment vote threshold would backfire, says newly formed opposition group, South Dakota Searchlight (May 15, 2025, 4:05 PM) [https://perma.cc/35U5-UAKJ].
    ↩︎
  13.  Utah, PlanScore (2022) [https://perma.cc/JK57-7E3H].
    ↩︎
  14.  League of Women Voters of Utah v. Utah State Legislature, 2025 WL 2662164 (Utah 2025).
    ↩︎
  15.  SJR 2, 2025 Gen. Sess. (Utah 2025) [https://perma.cc/V348-Y4CK].
    ↩︎
  16.  Robert Gehrke, Want to change Utah law? Citizen initiatives will cost an extra $1.4M under GOP Senate-passed bill., The Salt Lake City Tribune (Jan. 24, 2025, 3:49 PM) [https://perma.cc/SU85-75V3].
    ↩︎
  17.  Jeremy Kohler, Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them., ProPublica (May 30, 2025, 5:00 AM) [https://perma.cc/QGF4-D6SB].
    ↩︎
  18.  Id.
    ↩︎
  19.  HB 335, 136th Gen. Assemb. (Ohio 2025) [https://perma.cc/6GL3-JWPT]. Anna Staver, Ohio bill would raise threshold for passing local taxes to 60%, Cleveland.com (Jun. 12, 2025, 2:09 PM) [https://perma.cc/L3WA-XSGL].
    ↩︎
  20.  Sub. H.B. No. 335, 136th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ohio 2025). 
    ↩︎
  21.  Ohio, PlanScore (2022) [​​https://perma.cc/V249-8WNU]. 
    ↩︎
  22.  Yurij Rudensky, Ohio lawmakers are confusing voters to codify gerrymandering, The Hill (Aug. 27 2024, 8:30 AM) [https://perma.cc/EY8M-NPQP].
    ↩︎
  23.  State ex rel. Citizens Not Politicians v. Ohio Ballot Board, 253 N.E.3d 12, 27 (Ohio, 2024); see also Daniel Nichanian, Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters, Bolts (Oct. 28, 2024) [https://perma.cc/SKN5-QGER].
    ↩︎