Key Southern ballot measures to watch in 2024

This fall, voters in the South will decide on more than two dozen ballot measures on issues ranging from abortion and school privatization to election laws and marijuana legalization. In some cases, battles are still brewing over how proposed initiatives will be described or, in the case of an abortion measure in Arkansas, whether it will appear on ballots at all.

While measures related to administrative and tax matters have received little attention, others, like Florida’s proposed constitutional amendments enshrining abortion rights and legalizing marijuana, have attracted tens of millions of dollars in political spending and are likely to boost voter turnout, affecting other elections on the ballot.

Here is Facing South’s rundown of the key 2024 ballot initiatives across the South:

Abortion measure in Florida — and maybe Arkansas?

According to a recent poll, Florida’s proposed Amendment Four — which would constitutionally guarantee abortion access up to 24 weeks into pregnancy — enjoys support from 69 percent of the state’s voters, more than the 60 percent needed for the measure to pass this fall.

Florida Republicans likely boosted Amendment Four’s chances when they passed a strict six-week abortion ban, which went into effect this spring. Backlash to the unpopular law, which even former president Trump described as a “terrible mistake,” has fueled amendment support. The ban has also energized Democratic voters, leading Republicans to worry it will affect down-ballot races and cause the GOP to lose its super-majority control of both legislative chambers.

Despite favorable polling and a war chest of more than $32 million, the Amendment Four campaign faces formidable obstacles, including a state electorate that’s become increasingly Republican in recent years. Advocates also accuse the GOP of procedural maneuvers to undermine the measure, such as using a recent budgetary hearing to exaggerate the amendment’s economic costs.

In Arkansas, partisan maneuvering has caused uncertainty about whether a pro-abortion initiative, the Arkansas Abortion Amendment, will even appear on the ballot.

The legal battle began in early July, when Arkansans for Limited Government submitted more than 101,500 signatures to qualify the measure, which would protect the right to an abortion up to 18 weeks or in cases of rape or incest, fatal fetal anomaly, or when the mother’s life is in danger. That was well over the 90,700 signatures needed, but in less than a week, Republican Secretary of State John Thurston rejected the signature filing, saying it lacked two minor pieces of paperwork — a “technicality,” advocates say — and brought signature counting and verification to a halt.

Days later, the Arkansas Times reported that Thurston’s office had admitted mistakes in describing the missing paperwork, making the state’s case appear even more flimsy. Arkansans for Limited Government quickly sued the Secretary of State’s office, arguing they actually had met the paperwork requirements, and, furthermore, those rules couldn’t be used to halt the signature-counting process.

As of July 24, the Arkansas Supreme Court had ordered the Secretary of State to begin counting the signatures, and said it will be holding another hearing the following week to determine next steps.

School initiative in Kentucky — but not Arkansas

In 2021, the Republican-led Kentucky legislature passed HB 563, which authorized so-called education opportunity accounts — schemes that allow donors to get a tax break on gifts used for private school expenses. It was an attempted end-run around Section 184 of Kentucky’s state constitution banning the use of public funds for private schools, stating, “No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools.” But the following year, the state supreme court unanimously ruled to strike down the plan, saying that using tax policy to indirectly siphon away public money for private schools was still a violation of the state constitution.

This year, Kentucky lawmakers in favor of school privatization decided to confront the constitutional barrier head-on by voting to put Amendment Two on the ballot, a measure that would reword the constitution to explicitly allow the General Assembly to spend money on non-public schools.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Beshear has vocally opposed the proposed amendment, saying, “The way to fix public education is to fix public education, to ensure we’re providing the funding that it needs … At the end of the day, these are private corporations that really want to get their hands on a lot of money that should be going to public schools.” The progressive Kentucky Center for Economic Policy has warned that privatization plans allowed by the amendment could drain more than $1 billion from public schools. Their research also found that rural, low-income schools would be the hardest hit — one of the reasons a dozen rural Republicans had initially voted against HB 563.

In Arkansas, school advocates came up short in their efforts to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would have required private schools receiving public funding to adhere to the same standards as public schools, among other education proposals. For AR Kids, the group behind the Educational Rights Amendment of 2024, said they had collected 69,968 signatures by the deadline, short of the 90,700 needed to qualify.

Noncitizen voting amendments in KY, NC, and SC

It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in every Southern state. But that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers from spreading disinformation about a supposed epidemic of undocumented voters and to push for state constitutional amendments banning noncitizen voting.

Current laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting — which typically include hefty fines, prison time, and possible deportation — appear to be working. A national analysis of legal actions by the conservative Heritage Foundation regarding election conduct found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. A commission launched in 2017 by then-president Trump failed to identify any prosecutable cases of noncitizen voting in federal elections. In North Carolina, an internal state investigation found only seven cases of noncitizens casting ballots between 2015 and 2021, mostly due to voter confusion.

Nonetheless, Republican-led legislatures in eight states — including Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina — voted to put constitutional amendments on the ballot in 2024 to prohibit noncitizen voting.

Aside from being unnecessary, voting rights advocates fear the measures will be used by GOP lawmakers to whip up hysteria about alleged immigrant voter fraud — and, as they did in 2020, call into question election results. Michael Waldman, president of the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, argued in a recent Congressional hearing that claims about widespread noncitizen voting are “an urban myth … being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election. This year, the Big Lie is being pre-deployed.”

Other ballot measures to watch

In Florida, Amendment Three, which would legalize marijuana for those 21 and older, is polling at more than the 60 percent support needed to pass, and the amendment’s backers have spent more than $40 million so far to woo voters. The state will also vote on two amendments opposed by voting rights advocates: Amendment One will change school board races from nonpartisan to partisan races, and Amendment Six will ban local governments from using public financing reforms, which in other places have been successful in reigning in political spending by special interests.

Louisiana voters will decide on five ballot initiatives, including a proposal to take money the state collects for offshore energy projects and put them into the Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund, a trust that supports projects to preserve Louisiana's endangered coastal areas.

West Virginia’s sole ballot initiative in 2024 is Amendment One, which would ban “medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing". The measure is largely preemptive, as assisted suicide isn’t legal in West Virginia and most states. If approved, West Virginia would be the first state in the country to codify such a ban in its state constitution.