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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Joining me now to break down some of the most interesting referendums and other ballot questions across the country today is Libby Nelson, deputy policy editor at Vox. She and her colleagues recently published an article titled 9 ballot measures to watch on Election Day. We probably won't get to all nine but we'll get to some really interesting ones. Libby, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Libby: Happy Election Day. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I want to focus mostly on ballot measures that could set interesting or important national precedents. For example, voting itself is on the ballot in several states. Your colleague Andrew Prokop chose to highlight Question 3 in Nevada that would effectively kill the partisan primary. What would a "yes" vote on Question 3 in Nevada mean?

Libby: A "yes" vote, what is, you say, get rid of the partisan primary, the process by which Democrats and Republicans currently choose their nominees, and instead have a sort of open free for all where the top five candidates from either party or really any party would advance to the general election. Then in the general election, they would be conducted under ranked-choice voting, which means voters would rank the candidates in order of their preference. It's really just meant to give chances to either candidate outside the two-party system or to break down the system of partisan politics in selecting candidates that's in place right now.

Brian Lehrer: Right. That's certainly what the supporters say. That this could help fix American politics by weakening the forces of partisanship and polarization if we had nonpartisan primaries, and just the most popular two people wound up in a runoff eventually instead of the most popular Democrat and the most popular Republican to their bases. What do the opponents of the measure say?

Libby: This measure is supposed to [unintelligible 00:02:08], for obvious reasons, for strong partisans in both parties because it weakens the role of the party and the role of some of the more extreme candidates in the process. One of the obvious consequences here is in some ways this is a measure that could potentially prevent former President Trump or someone like him from getting on the ballot again. At the same time, also on the left, we've seen that the partisan primary can be an effective route to getting a progressive candidate elected to a safer seat, the process through which someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. That's really where the opposition is coming from on that front.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, since the Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v. Wade earlier this year, states are picking up the battle on whether to add it to their state's constitutions or expressly prohibit abortion rights from being added to their state constitutions. Two big ones right now are in Michigan and Kentucky. It looks to me that they're kind of the opposite of each other. Like in Michigan, there's a ballot proposal that would enshrine abortion rights. In Kentucky, there's a ballot proposal that would prevent abortion rights. Am I saying this right?

Libby: That's absolutely right. If you remember the Kansas referendum in August on a constitutional amendment that got a lot of attention, and where abortion rights supporters eventually were victorious, the Kentucky proposal is pretty much a carbon copy of that. What we're looking at is something that explicitly states that there's no right in the state constitution to an abortion. What that does is it opens the way for the state legislature basically to regulate abortion or to ban or prohibit abortion in any way that they want.

Michigan, as you say, is pretty much the opposite. It's establishing a right to reproductive freedom which includes abortion, but also contraception, in vitro fertilization, other sorts of prenatal and pregnancy care, explicitly in the constitution. We sort of have two states that are mirror images of each other, and that are going to be very, very closely watched as a signal of where the country might be on abortion rights.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any take on what precedents would be set depending on how these go? Certainly looking at Kentucky - Southern, conservative, fairly evangelical state - if abortion rights win, what does that do to the national debate?

Libby: Certainly if we see a victory for abortion rights in Kentucky, we may see a push for more of these constitutional measures or ballot initiative measures in other states. Sort of a replica, again, of what we saw in Kansas state where the reaction was, "Wow. If abortion rights can win there, what does that mean about the landscape? What does that mean about the possibility of taking this directly to the voters rather than the state legislature?"

Obviously, how much of that can be done depends a lot on the individual goals in every state. Not every state can you just throw a question on the ballot and have people weigh in on it. Certainly, if the abortion rights side wins in Kentucky we're going to see a lot of interest from abortion rights supporters in how that could maybe be expanded to other states nationwide.

Brian Lehrer: In Michigan, I wonder if it might help the Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer get reelected. I remember the 2004 presidential election, where one of the reasons that George W. Bush was reelected in a very close race was that he won Ohio by a hair because the Republicans that year put an anti-gay marriage measure on the ballot. That drove more Republican turnout than it drove Democratic turnout. I wonder if the abortion rights referendum in Michigan might drive more Democratic turnout than Republican turnout and help Governor Whitmer.

Libby: Absolutely. I think that's something that is going to be watched very closely in terms of this Michigan amendment specifically, and the result in Michigan as a whole. Abortion is up on the ballot both literally and also metaphorically through the governor election, the state legislature election. Democrats are certainly hoping that a surge of pro-choice or pro-abortion rights support is able to carry them forward in Michigan and other states. I do think there will be questions about what this does for turnout and what that can mean for future elections if we see some success for the abortion rights movement there.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Another interesting ballot measure, Proposition 209 in Arizona would limit medical debt. What's that about?

Libby: Medical debt is one of the most common forms of debt held in America. It's an interesting measure supported by consumer advocates and anti-debt activists that they're really hoping can be a model for the rest of the country. It would cap the interest rate that can be charged for medical debt at 3%. An interesting thing about this is between when this got on the ballot and now, interest rates throughout the economy have gone up so much that that's an even better deal than that might have seemed for people holding medical debt at first. It would also limit debt collectors' ability to seize your house or your car or garnish your wages.

It's really just an attempt to limit the effect that medical debt could have on people's lives. Certainly, the organizers of that amendment are hoping that it will become a national pattern. A funny thing about this one is as far as I can tell, there has not been a single poll taken about this, so we have absolutely no idea how it's going to turn out.

Brian Lehrer: Another one that's interesting to me in another state that wasn't on your list of nine, but I think is also fascinating, is from Oregon. There's a ballot measure there to guarantee a right to affordable health care in the state constitution. The website oregonlive.com is calling it aspirational, meaning it's merely aspirational because it doesn't guarantee all the funding that might be needed. I'm curious if this has crossed your awareness at all. Oregon voters might declare health care a right today.

Libby: It's certainly interesting to me for exactly the reason you say. It's not an amendment with necessarily a lot of teeth or with a lot of immediate impact, but it is something that would enshrine that right in their state constitution. That's something that could open up interesting questions down the road if that's something that is guaranteed in Oregon. What does that mean, for example, for future cases that come before the court?

A thing that's important about this amendment is that it basically says in the same breath, "Well, we have to balance the funding for health care against everything else the state pays for like schools and essential services." As you say, we wouldn't see much of an immediate impact from it, but it's interesting from a philosophical point of view, and could be also just an interesting barometer of where things stand and how people feel about health care in that state right now.

Brian Lehrer: If there might be a right to health care voted in in Oregon today, there might be a right to collective bargaining voted in in Illinois. Your article on Vox, you and your colleagues' article, referred to that. What kind of a right to collective bargaining?

Libby: Illinois, we've seen some ping-ponging back and forth between Democrats and Republicans on labor rights. What this would essentially do is eliminate that. It would write the right to collective bargaining and some other labor rights into the constitution. If another Republican governor were to take office to encourage cities to pass the so-called right-to-work laws, which limit the bargaining power of unions by allowing people not to pay dues in exchange for representation, they wouldn't be able to do that. It just tries to lock in labor rights and provide what supporters would call more stability or more predictability on that front going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Another interesting one is the California-- Sorry. I lost my place here for a second.

Libby: There's a lot of them.

Brian Lehrer: There are a lot of them. Again, listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Libby Nelson from Vox. Vox has an article on nine interesting ballot measures around the country to watch. One really interesting one is in California, where they're voting on whether to levy an additional tax on themselves so they can build out an electric vehicle infrastructure. Would that be for charging stations all over the state?

Libby: Yes. That's usually when we're talking about electric vehicles' infrastructure. That's the kind of thing that they mean. Basically the power infrastructure you need in order to be able to charge more electric vehicles. This is an interesting one because the coalition in favor and against is interesting and mixed up. The timber industry, for example, opposes it, and nobody can really tell why even though there is allotting some of the funds from this tax to wildfire prevention. In addition to electric vehicles, it's one of the two provisions in it. Governor Gavin Newsom has come out against it. It's a little bit more mixed up than the politics on some of these ballot measures.

Brian Lehrer: Oh. Newsom is against that?

Libby: Yes. He came out and made some ads against it, and the favorability of the amendment began to fall pretty rapidly after that. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that tonight.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I see that what that would be is a 1.75%, one and three-quarters percent, tax on income over $2 million. That would be a tax on the wealthy because that's not $2 million of savings. That's $2 million of income in a single one year. If I'm reading this right, that's who would be asked to foot that bill.

All right. The last one in your article - I think maybe we did get through all nine - is New Mexico's Constitutional Amendment 1, which would mean funding pre-K in a state where "more than a quarter of New Mexico's children under five live in poverty" according to your colleague at Vox, Rachel Cohen. Is this as straightforward as it seems? Universal pre-K statewide in New Mexico if this succeeds?

Libby: It's pretty straightforward. New Mexico has a trust fund financed by oil and gas revenue that is already drawn down to fund education. This would essentially add early childhood to the list of things that trust fund funds, which would open the way to a really significant expansion of pre-K in the state. Obviously, any kind of ballot measure doesn't get into the nitty-gritty of where is the pre-K going to be delivered. How is it going to be provided? It would be a really big win for early childhood education in a state that has thoroughly poor outcomes for very young children at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: I'm surprised that this isn't either a ballot measure or a breakout bill on its own, a standalone bill in Congress. You know that here in New York City, Bill de Blasio made that a signature policy of his when he was elected mayor. He ran on it in 2013. Then he succeeded in implementing universal pre-K for four-year-olds. Now they're trying to expand it to universal 3-K for three-year-olds.

Bill de Blasio, who left the mayoralty fairly unpopular with New Yorkers, was still overwhelmingly popular for that. That was clearly a winning issue. It was in Biden's original Build Back Better bill. The bigger version that had to be trimmed down because he couldn't get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on board. I've wondered why the Democrats don't float that as a standalone bill because I think Democrats and Republicans and independents around the country would probably feel very favorably toward universal pre-K.

Libby: At the national level in Congress, it feels like we've been on the brink of a universal pre-K bill for eight or more years now. It was something that Obama wanted to do. It was a feature of the Hillary Clinton campaign. As you say, the Democrats tried for it in Build Back Better and it got cut out early. It's a quintessential example of an idea that polls well and has some bipartisan support. You can point to a lot of red states such as Oklahoma that have done this kind of expansions, and they've been popular and well-used. When push comes to shove, it just doesn't get prioritized enough to get over the finish line.

Certainly, advocates are hoping that a victory in New Mexico would be, first of all, just some good news and a policy cause that's had not necessarily setbacks, but has stalled out somewhat recently, but also could maybe once again provide a push for some forward momentum at the national level.

Brian Lehrer: I'll mention the one voting-oriented ballot measure in our listening area in Connecticut, where they're going to decide whether or not to institute early voting. 46 of the 50 states have it, Connecticut and three others do not. I don't know if you reported on it, but I wonder if you have a sense of whether that's going to be a shoo-in in the state of Connecticut. We have 15 seconds left

Libby: [laughs] I haven't reported much on this, but given that I'm shocked that Connecticut doesn't, I would certainly not bet against it at this point.

Brian Lehrer: Libby Nelson, she and her colleagues at Fox recently published an article titled 9 ballot measures to watch on Election Day. Libby is their deputy policy editor. Thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.

Libby: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that is our informal, unofficial, thoroughly unscientific exit poll, plus guest, for Election Day 2022. Join me tonight at 7:00 when we begin our election night coverage. Don't forget the polls are open until nine o'clock in New York, eight o'clock in New Jersey and Connecticut, and also in Pennsylvania. The polls do close at 7:00 in Georgia, so we may have some early returns when our coverage starts. Join me tonight at 7:00. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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