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Rising costs and the dominance of money in the initiative process are a function of identifiable political and legal trends and institutional choices, not an inherent flaw of direct democracy. Since 2010, growing partisan polarization, the proliferation of state-level trifectas, and increased gerrymandering have all . More recently, in the wake of several successful progressive initiatives in conservative states, many state legislatures have imposed new qualification and petition rules that further raise the cost of qualifying for the ballot while increasing the rate at which they .

Many of these purported “reforms” are process killers masquerading as process improvements. Higher signature thresholds, expanded geographic distribution requirements, shortened circulation windows, burdensome and expensive new petition regulations, and often increase costs while doing little to improve integrity, homegrown authenticity, or policy quality. In practice, such measures disproportionately hurt the volunteer-driven and grassroots campaigns that the initiative was originally created to empower. Any reform agenda should start by avoiding such counterproductive changes. Beyond that baseline, our work identifies several opportunities for reform.

Most states with initiative processes adopted them long before the Supreme Court ruled against capping contributions and expenditures for ballot campaigns. As long as those rulings stand, money will remain a dominant feature of direct democracy. Rather than bury our heads in the sand, it is better to adopt new processes to ensure that money cannot easily substitute for public support. 

The evidence presented in this report suggests, for example, that the initiative process’s principal vulnerability to concentrated wealth lies more in ballot access than in Election Day persuasion. Reform efforts focused exclusively on campaign spending thus risk missing the more consequential ways in which money sets the agenda and structures participation. 

For these reasons, the appropriate response to concerns about money in direct democracy is to level the playing field for grassroots, volunteer-driven efforts rather than abandoning the tool. 

One of the most direct ways to reduce costs and boost agenda-setting power for authentic people-driven initiative campaigns is to revisit qualification rules that function as cost multipliers. Signature thresholds and geographic distribution requirements in particular materially affect the cost of qualification. Modest adjustments to these rules can broaden participation without eliminating legitimate safeguards. 

Additional reforms may further facilitate greater grassroots participation relative to elites and provide helpful informational cues to voters about the motivations of initiative sponsors. As and other direct democracy scholars have argued, public financing or in-kind support for grassroots qualification efforts—such as subsidized signature verification or matching funds for small-dollar initiative campaigns—warrant consideration, though such methods remain underexplored in the United States. Technological reforms could likewise lower costs over time. Secure digital signature collection, administered by a nonpartisan authority, could significantly reduce qualification burdens. Expanded translation and language-access support may further improve participation.

Indirect initiative pathways can also reduce costs as legislatures can adopt proposed measures before they reach the ballot, allowing some campaigns to avoid the far greater expense of full election contests. Across the nine states with an indirect initiative process, 11.5 percent of qualified indirect initiatives since 2014 were acted on by the legislature instead of going to the ballot. (It should be noted, however, that some of these measures were accepted by the legislature only to be altered by the legislature or overturned later via veto referendum.)

Many indirect initiative states also allow some combination of direct initiated statutes and indirect or direct initiated constitutional amendments. To incentivize grassroots campaigns in these states to make greater use of the potentially less expensive indirect statutory route, states that don’t currently protect indirect initiatives from immediate legislative alteration, or from being , should add such protections. In the smaller subset of states with both direct and indirect statutory initiative pathways, reformers should also experiment with setting lower signature requirements for qualifying indirect initiatives for the ballot.

States should also avoid unnecessarily pushing campaigns toward constitutional amendment pathways when statutory routes would otherwise suffice. As discussed earlier in this report, constitutional amendment campaigns are substantially more expensive to qualify than statutory initiatives. Yet where legislatures may immediately amend or repeal initiated statutes, organizers often rationally choose the more expensive constitutional route to secure policy durability.

A more balanced system would preserve the relative accessibility of statutory initiatives while providing greater assurance that voter-enacted laws will receive meaningful protection. More states should require initiated statutes to remain in force for a defined cooling-off period (two years, for example) before legislative amendment, or permit modification only through bipartisan or supermajority legislative approval. Such measures reduce incentives to constitutionalize ordinary policy contests while preserving legislative flexibility over the longer term.

States can also strengthen the informational environment in which initiatives are considered. Sustainably funded Citizens’ Initiative Reviews and voter guides that include independent fiscal and constitutional reviews can reduce voters’ reliance on paid campaign messaging. In a of California residents, 77 percent of respondents in California reported favoring an independent citizens’ initiative commission that would hold public hearings on initiatives and then make ballot recommendations in the official voter guide. More ambitious proposals would move deliberation upstream by empowered to review or advance proposals before they reach the ballot. While such approaches remain largely theoretical and would require substantial experimentation, they illustrate one possible path toward reducing the role of money in agenda-setting without eliminating citizen-led policymaking.

Disclosure rules remain the only available method of campaign finance regulation in initiative campaigns. While stricter disclosure regimes have failed to shrink the overall scale of initiative campaigns, it is hard to argue against rules that protect the integrity of the process. Certain disclosure requirements make hidden channels riskier, make donor identities more salient to voters, and probably deter some reputation-sensitive contributors at the margin. 

However, disclosure systems should be calibrated carefully. Overly complex or labor-intensive campaign finance reporting requirements can impose disproportionate burdens on leaner, volunteer-run campaigns already struggling to compete in a highly professionalized environment. Disclosure systems that preserve robust transparency for large donors and professionalized campaigns while simplifying compliance for smaller efforts can strike a better balance. 

Top-donor disclaimers and true-source reporting appear to offer the greatest promise for improving voter decision-making, particularly when donor identity is visible at key decision points. If voters can readily infer the interests and motivations behind a campaign, disclosure may help reduce reliance on costly and misleading advertising. This could lower overall spending in the persuasion phase—the most expensive phase of the campaign, as shown above—and discourage campaigns that depend on voter confusion or misalignment with underlying preferences. However, these effects are not well understood. More research is needed to determine which formats, delivery mechanisms, and messaging strategies enable disclosure to serve as an effective signal of donor intent, especially to counter high-cost campaign tactics that can lead voters to support outcomes inconsistent with their own preferences.

More structural reforms may be necessary in especially high-cost environments. Again, California offers a useful stress test because it combines high usage, high cost, and heavy professionalization in a single system. 

Notably, even in California—a cautionary tale for most critics of modern direct democracy—voters remain broadly supportive of the initiative process despite expressing significant concerns about its operation. , 67 percent of California voters said it’s a good thing citizens can make laws via initiative, and 63 percent reported being at least somewhat satisfied with how the process is working. At the same time, the vast majority of respondents said the process is influenced by special interests and requires at least “minor changes.” 

The state’s crowded ballots demonstrate that initiatives remain formally accessible, but in practice that access is largely limited to well-funded campaigns. One alternative approach for California and other high-cost qualification states would be a differentiated, two-track qualification system separating professionalized campaigns from genuinely citizen-led efforts. California’s current rules require hundreds of thousands of signatures within a relatively short 180-day period, effectively forcing campaigns to rely on paid signature-gathering firms. Under a two-track model, campaigns that use paid circulators or exceed certain fundraising thresholds could face higher qualification requirements or disclosure obligations, while volunteer-driven campaigns could qualify under more accessible rules, such as lower thresholds, longer timelines, and reduced compliance burdens.

Reforms to ballot access and initiative durability, however, do not fully address what initiatives are being used to decide. California also illustrates the governance challenges that arise when initiatives are used to resolve highly technical fiscal and budgetary questions. in 1978 locked in tax and budget rules that were shifting more fiscal decisions onto the ballot and contributing .

For this reason, subject-matter restrictions deserve greater consideration from pro–direct democracy reformers. While broad exclusions risk neutering the process (as in Illinois), restrictions on technical tax and budget rules could simultaneously mitigate some of the problems facing direct democracy and our representative institutions. Reserving certain fiscal matters for legislative negotiation and decision could reduce the kinds of confusing technical ballot questions that make voters most susceptible to manipulative advertising, lower administrative costs, and strengthen legislative accountability by ensuring elected officials bear responsibility for ongoing fiscal tradeoffs and votes.

The challenge for reformers, whether they’re seeking to proactively strengthen existing initiative processes or adopt the initiative in their state for the first time, is to ensure that processes are designed for contemporary political realities: accessible enough to permit meaningful citizen participation, structured enough to maintain long-term legitimacy, and calibrated to prevent wealthy interests and individuals from determining whose ideas are heard or what measures pass or fail.