Episode 13: What Are Ballot Initiatives and How Are They Used?

How do ordinary citizens get legislative measures on the ballot? What threats are being made to the process? Maresa Strano of New America and Chris Melody Fields Figueredo from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center share a breakdown.

Learn more by reading New America’s report Expanding Citizen-Led Policymaking in the Twenty-First Century.

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Transcript

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Listen, we’re in an existential threat right now. What is happening across the country with, you know, the future of our democracy? It touches ballot measures. There could be a near future where maybe we have on paper the initiative process, but because essentially these state legislators do not feel beholden to the people that they are supposed to represent in government, it wouldn’t matter, right?

Shannon Lynch: In the U.S., citizens have long been able to propose initiatives that go on the ballot for a public vote. But today, only about half of the states allow people to gather signatures to make that happen. So, where did ballot initiatives start? And why is this tradition now at risk?

Welcome to Democracy Deciphered, the podcast where we analyze the past, present, and future of American democracy. I’m your host, Shannon Lynch. I’m thrilled to be joined today by Maresa Strano and Chris Melody Fields Figueredo to talk all things ballot initiatives.

Maresa Strano is the deputy director of the political reform program at New America, where she works on electoral reform and state and local governance issues. She has written for outlets such as Fox, Washington Monthly, Democracy Journal, and NBC Think. She also teaches at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. Before joining New America, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Ballotpedia. Maresa holds a Master of Science in international relations from the University of Surrey and a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Also with us today is Chris Melody Fields Figueredo. Chris has served as the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center’s Executive Director since 2018, bringing two decades of experience in advocacy, movement building, and creating collaborative spaces. As a queer, Venezuelan-American, woman of color, who immigrated to the U.S. As a child, she leads from lived experience with a commitment to equity and justice. Chris believes in the transformative power of ballot measures to advance LGBTQ rights, expand voting access, and dismantle systems of oppression. Her career spans senior roles at Rethink Media, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Common Cause, and DC ParentSmart, where she led national programs, crafted messaging strategies, and fought for access.

Maresa, Chris, thank you so much for joining me.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Thanks for having us.

Maresa Strano: Thanks, Shannon.

Shannon Lynch So, for our listeners who aren’t familiar, what is a ballot initiative exactly?

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: So it is often called direct democracy. And what does that really mean? It essentially means you and me, we have the opportunity to put issues on the ballot. Sometimes it’s called the ballot initiative. People might be familiar with a referendum, ballot measure, you know, those are all the different sort of names that they’re called. Sometimes it’s a constitutional amendment, right? So people are making a change to their state constitution, some folks might be legislative or statute fixed. So that’s essentially what it is, right? We go into our communities, we wanna put issues on the ballot that we ourselves get to vote for, right?

And I think that’s really important for people to understand of like, we know the federal government, we know, you know, the Supreme Court or courts in our community. We know our state legislatures, but we are such an important part of our democracy. It actually doesn’t happen without us. And ballot measures are our way of really getting to put our dreams into reality. And, you know, representative government is important. It’s necessary, and also, I think democracy is an action. We have to be a part of that. So. You know, really ballot measures or ballot initiatives are our tool, the people’s tool to take some action. Maresa, do you want to add anything?

Maresa Strano: No, that’s a great description. One way sometimes I describe it to people who are unfamiliar is just it’s a sort of crowd-sourced legislation. Citizens are put in the shoes of legislators, and they get to be creative in placing ideas, new policy ideas directly on the ballot. So it has that kind of feel of like an innovative tool when you put it in those terms. And which is appropriate because the initiative process has facilitated so much policy innovation over time. That kind of thing does tend to come from the people broadly.

Shannon Lynch: Crowdsourced legislation, I love that. Okay, so going back to the beginning, how did ballot initiatives first come about in the U.S.? And what sparked their creation in the first place?

Maresa Strano: They actually date back pretty far. Ballot initiatives go back in the U.S. to the Populist and the Progressive movements of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. That’s a period, the Progressive Era, that’s been coming up a lot recently because of its similarities to today and today’s political environment specifically. The first state to adopt an initiative statewide was South Dakota in 1898. And other Western states followed suit pretty quickly. I specifically wanna shout out Oregon here because it was the first to implement a system. And many at that time, that early spread period referred to initiatives and referenda as the Oregon model. So at that time progressive reformers and socialists and populists, they were super frustrated with how their state governments were working, or rather not working.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Not working.

Maresa Strano: Yeah, not working exactly for most of the people that they were elected to represent and serve. So they were fed up with the politics of the Gilded Age, the robber barons, and the party machines that made the system corrupt. It made it exclusionary and opaque and just generally out of step with the electorate. You know, this was a growing and kind of newly organized and newly mobilized working class electorate, this is a time of rapid industrialization, and new constituencies were kind of coming online and wanting more of a voice and the system as it was functioning didn’t really give them that voice.

So, you know, thanks to a coalition of strange bedfellows, as it usually happens, you know, unions and third parties and farm groups and journalists and even kind of sympathetic members of the major parties, 21 states adopted some form of statewide initiative process over like a 20-year period at the beginning of the 20th century. And that’s just astonishing when you think about it. When you consider that that required legislators to voluntarily cede some of their own power. That doesn’t happen that much. That is in defiance of their self-interest, of what is natural, but they saw the writing on the wall, the demand was there, they were facing legitimacy crises, and it happened.

And just one more point on this, on the initial expansion, is that most of the states were in the West. And that was because of the political culture of these new Western states. So newer states, they had weaker party structures. They were more populous and more entrepreneurial energy, going back to that innovation idea. And they also had more cynicism about, and less trust of kind of legacy political institutions that centralized power. Chris, I want to leave it to you to fill in the blanks, maybe about why other places didn’t.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Yeah, I mean, I think a really important part of the history, which you and I talked about in the report that you were working on, that is really important for folks to remember, is that the majority of the formerly enslaved states do not have direct democracy. The last state that actually adopted it, which was in like 1992, was Mississippi, which also is the latest state to actually lose the tool which we can get into later and I think that’s really important part of the history of direct democracy. The only two states from the deep south that had it were Mississippi formerly and then in Florida still has it, but that one has a super majority that we can get into as well. So I think that’s a really important context that, you know, a majority of the states that had or were formerly enslaved states that had a large Black population, do not still today have direct democracy. And those origins, those beginnings are really important for us to remember as we continue this experiment of what does democracy look like in the United States.

Shannon Lynch: Wow, that historical context is really interesting. Again, still talking in a kind of historical lens here, what are—I know that there’s been many—but what are some of the most famous or most notorious ballot initiatives that have had really significant impacts in the states in which they were instituted?

Maresa Strano: I can start with some more historical ones. So, I mean, if we’re talking long-term impact on the United States and state politics and on society, I think some of the earliest initiatives enacted during that Progressive Era we were just discussing are some of the most significant. They have the longest tails. So those include things like women’s suffrage initiatives. Chris was just talking about the restricted franchise of that time. The initiative enabled many women to vote for the first time in their states. The direct election of senators, it used to be state legislatures that chose senators, bans on child labor, regulation of major industry, and love them or hate them, direct primaries. Direct party primaries are a U.S. innovation, and they sprang from Progressive Era initiatives.

I can fast forward then to like the second major wave of initiatives that began in the 70s. There was one major standout that everybody is familiar with and you said notorious, so I have to bring it up. That’s California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, which capped property taxes, and it limited the legislature’s ability to raise revenues. That sparked a tax revolt nationwide. It also made initiatives like a boogeyman for legislators and made California like the poster state for everything that’s wrong with the initiative process, fair or not. And

I’ll turn it over to Chris to get into some of the more notorious, more conservative, tinged initiatives of that era, and then to where we are now, which is I think sort of a callback to those more progressive liberal origins.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo Yeah. Thanks for, for the alley-oop. But you know, during that time, there were a lot of anti-environmental ballot measures, a lot of anti-LGBTQ, women’s rights, like a lot of those issues were happening during those 70s and 80s. And actually, for quite some time, progressives were on the defensive for the initiative process.

And I think another really important inflection point, which is part of BISC’s history, why we exist today, was the taxpayer bill of rights that emerged from states like Colorado, which again, to what Maresa just talked about, right, it had a huge impact on the ability for states to raise revenue for public needs. And this was a coming together of labor organizations, especially different types of civil rights organizations. All these communities that were on the defense during this period really were looking for an organization or a central hub to sort of begin to develop strategy to fight. And in those early days, it was incredibly defensive. It was fighting back, but we also began to win. I would say one of the first waves was of minimum wage increases in the 2000s. And that, it’s important, right?

Like that is the reason why the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center was created. The organization that I run was to give progressives the opportunity to come together, to meet together, to think about what draft policy could look like, you know, start to begin and imagine what it could look like. I think the next inflection point that I think a lot of folks will remember in more recent history is the anti-marriage equality that then shifted to the marriage equality fights of the 2010s. And, right, again, it started from a posture of being on defense on anti-LGBTQ issues and then people came together and this was part of that story, to begin to shift the narrative around those issues. And I think it’s so important for people to remember that ballot measures actually allow us to have a deeper understanding of public opinion, what messages work, what messages don’t work, and really have people to come together from all walks of life. So then quickly fast forward. Then we had another wave of minimum wage increases, Medicaid expansion, and then most recently, we’ve seen, after the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, around reproductive and abortion rights.

Maresa Strano: I just want to put a finer point on what Chris was saying about about it’s like shifting from a defensive to an offensive posture, and how a tool that kind of seemed at the time to be more in service of conservative causes could then be turned around and you know repurposed for a progressive one.

So I think today people frame the initiative process more in kind of liberal progressive terms, like this is a weapon of the left. But it’s just, it’s easy to forget, but we shouldn’t forget that for like 30 years, it was primarily utilized by conservative activists, and it could easily switch back again. That it’s really, it just where the people are and it’s filling where people see there are gaps in what their representatives are delivering them in terms of policy.

I can’t totally leave this question behind without giving a little salute to some of the more recent political reform ballot measures. Just because ballot issues are so uniquely suited to political reform, it’s really hard for politicians to give up power. So what Katie Fahey pulled off with the anti-gerrymandering measure in Michigan was remarkable. The initiative to enact rank choice voting in Maine. Arizona has clean elections. I think those measures are like the most kind of direct legacy of what the progressives were trying to do in democratizing elections in government and would make them somewhat proud. Whether you like them or not, those would absolutely not have been possible through a legislative strategy. It’s practically impossible to get political reform done these days through the legislature.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Yeah, and one reason that exists, if you don’t mind, is, you know, because of the 2010 census. So like the census is going to come back up, y’all. Right? And right now, right, what we’re hearing in states like Texas, that are in the middle of doing a power grab through redistricting in that state. After that 2010 census, there was redistricting. And out of that was born a lot of these Republican trifectas across the country. And so that led to, especially grassroots organizations and leaders, seeing that popular legislation, like raising the minimum wage, people understand the economic hardships. These are widely popular, regardless of party affiliation. It really became a tool of necessity for these organizations to turn to the initiative process to do what representative government should have been doing.

Shannon Lynch: Maresa, I’m going to pass it back over to you again with this one. And, you know, we’ve kind of danced around this, but how have ballot initiatives shifted over time, and like specifically, I am thinking about what lessons can we draw from the past of ballot initiatives in what we’re seeing today and how ballot initiatives are being pursued?

Maresa Strano: Sure, so we know that in terms of adopting the process itself that what is effective, what is historically effective and what continues to be somewhat effective today in political reform generally and initiative adoption does constitute kind of a political perform is competition between the major parties. If you feel too comfortable in your majority, you’re probably not inclined to make any changes.

We’ve already touched on this, but kind of broad-based, cross-sector, cross-cultural, cross-class coalitions are very hard to deny, and they have been indispensable in making all sorts of initiative campaigns successful. Without that, it’s almost impossible to get a process to begin with and then to use that process effectively to reflect the will of the people. So when you see just one narrow interest group lobbying for a change, it doesn’t have the same pull. It’s not going to resonate and you’re not going to be able to recruit the broad-based volunteers that you need to make a campaign successful.

The other important things that I’ll mention are more kind of conditions that lend themselves to change historically and today. And I think we can see there are a lot of parallels. High economic inequality makes people agitate for change. When there’s massive technological change or people feel like, you know, their status might be threatened by something, it can make people agitate for change that we might think of as good or bad. When people feel that their legislators or other representative government bodies are not doing their job, that they’re not legitimate, it can force people to resort to more kind of authoritarian populist tendencies and what the initiative has been able to do at times is to give people a more kind of constructive way to channel some of that populist energy by giving them something to do and some way that they can like visibly engage in the process and affect change.

I mean, the bottom line is that, like historically, when people felt disconnected from government or ignored by government, they adopted a mechanism to bring themselves back in. And to be a check on government. And that’s kind of what’s happening today, you know, with gridlock and polarization and gerrymandering as we’ve covered with, you know, we’re talking at the state level, but Trump does matter because now our politics are so nationalized. That rising authoritarianism, that thread that’s now kind of running through our politics, it needs to be met by something constructive. And that’s why I think we see an increased use of the initiative process to push through popular reforms that elected officials are ignoring. And yeah, and Chris already talked about like the important economic justice measures and stuff like those, like, have almost an undefeated record that totally tracks with the history of initiatives. But also, you know, the process has become more professionalized, and Chris can speak to that better than anyone.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Well, I mean, I think, Maresa, you said something that’s really important, you know, and I sort of mentioned it earlier, right? Like, we learn in school about the executive branch, the judicial branch, the legislative branch, and we talk about those checks and balances. This is where we insert us. Like, We the people, right are a critical check and balance to government in all the ways that you described. Like, we are so critical to this process, to the ability to have a thriving democracy.

And, you know, I believe, like, I want to have, I want a truly representative, inclusive democracy. I want to believe that a person whom I elect is going to represent me and my interests and my community’s interests, regardless of party affiliation. But we’re human beings, and we know that’s not always the reality, and power is a funny, tricky thing. And that’s why I emphasize so much that it is important for us to remember that we are this critical part of our democracy. And yes, like we have, there’s literally an organization and other organizations, right? That their job and our job, right, is to help advocates across the country learn how to use the tool, right? And so there has become this whole, you know, set of folks, whether it’s consultants, whether it’s advocates. Whether it’s even legislators too, that have learned how to wield power through direct democracy and we hold an annual conference called Road Ahead, Maresa was there, where we bring those folks together to share and exchange ideas, to share best practices, to learn. It’s so incredibly important to do that and that’s an important note too as this continues to get more professional for us to remember, to connect it back to the people, to the grassroots, to the everyday people who have to be reflected in a part of our democracy.

Shannon Lynch: And I just want to make sure, I’m going to back up a little bit, but I just want to makes sure that we cover this one before we head into our last couple of questions, but just from a nuts and bolts perspective today, what, and I know it’s different from state to state, but in general, how does one get an initiative on the ballot?

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: You know, once upon a time, I think before I became executive director, there was a little, we need like an infographic and video of how a bill becomes a law. Remember, I can’t even remember, Schoolhouse Rock, right? Yeah. For the initiative process, right, because only half of the country, I grew up in Texas, so like direct democracy, state-wide initiatives, that was foreign to me. I didn’t know what it was because I grew up in Texas, and so there’s half of the country that has no understanding of this at all.

But at its core, right, let’s say there’s an issue in your community that you really want to tackle. Medicaid expansion, which was something that after Obamacare was passed, became really popular to expand to the states that did not have full coverage. You go into your community, you work on drafting what that potential law could look like. The way we, the framework that BISC uses is the ballot measure life cycle. So you begin to incubate, like create the coalition, set what the policy could look, like test it. And then you sort of make the decision, right? Like from all that talking and testing to make a decision to go or not go.

And then begins the process once you get that approved, you go into your community and you have people sign a petition, you knock on doors, you stand on the street corner, you go to festivals and you ask people, do you wanna put this issue on the ballot, right? That’s the signature gathering process. Every state has a different threshold that you have to meet. Then it goes through the approval process once you’ve reached that threshold.

And then you start the sort of campaign. That’s when you go directly to talk to voters that you’ve gotten approved, you’re going to vote for it in November, June, or whatever election. It might be on a primary election, it might be in a general election, right? Then you actually start that process to actually get people to vote yes. And sometimes you want them to vote no too.

And then you’re successful, you win or you defeat something and then begins the implementation process. So we really try to train people through that entire life cycle. Because even if you win at the ballot, that’s not the end of the story. And that is happening in real time right now in states like Missouri that passed paid sick leave and raising the minimum wage in 2024. And the state legislature has overturned that and the governor vetoed that. So it’s really important to think about the whole life cycle and your entry points in each of those moments to be able to be successful and continue that work.

Maresa Strano: And if I may add, you may actually understand just from Chris’s description of the process, but it’s extremely expensive.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Oh, yeah.

Maresa Strano: And maybe that’s not something that the progressive era reformers who originated the idea here had envisioned. But along with it becoming a more professionalized system has become extremely expensive. And that’s where you get the criticisms, which are often very fair, that the system can be easily hijacked by billionaires and other economic special interests, you know, there’s like this whole economy around it with vendors and paid signature gatherers, which sometimes is like totally necessary and an equity issue. People are doing work, they should be paid, but that can be interpreted in different ways.

But the process is extremely hard. And that’s why it’s, you know, it’s not exactly the path of least resistance, despite not having to go through the statehouse. It’s extremely technical and it actually is like almost impossible to do it without as a pure grassroots operation without the support of a group like BISC and without big money.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Yeah. And that’s actually where Citizens United really comes into play, has had an adverse effect on the rise of the cost of the initiative process. Yeah.

Shannon Lynch: Chris, I’m going to direct this next one at you. So what efforts have we seen in recent years of lawmakers trying to restrict this process, this access to this process of getting an initiative on the ballot by ordinary citizens?

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: So, one of the things I like to say is when you push on power, power pushes back. And that is very true for the last, I would say, 10, 15 years, as we, many states have raised the minimum wage, have expanded Medicaid, have, as Maresa noted, created independent redistricting commissions, abolished slavery as a form of punishment from state constitutions. You name it. And then the most recent history and example is around reproductive rights. So, as that has happened, we have seen escalating attacks on the process itself. And that takes a couple of forms. One, outright denial of the will of the people and state legislatures just refusing to implement these voter-approved initiatives.

In 2017, after Maine approved Medicaid expansion, then-Governor LePage completely refused to implement Medicaid expansion. The courts had to step in, and eventually they did get it. But what we’re seeing more and more these days is actually like the picking at the process itself.

This is the really even nerdier part of this, right? It’s what we have seen around raising the threshold to pass a ballot measure. That really came into play in 2018 after Florida, they passed a ballot to restore voting rights to returning citizens. That next year, the state legislature referred a ballot that would raise the threshold and Florida already has the highest threshold, 60 percent of super majority to pass the constitutional amendment. They put before voters an initiative to raise it to 65 percent, just one percentage point above what amendment four won. So that’s one bucket, and it’s important to note, every time these have been put before voters, except for one, they have been rejected. So they’ve tried to change the signature gathering requirements, increase it, have very, very specific geographic distribution requirements. They’re trying to do all these different kind of technical things to impact the process.

Then, I think, the one thing i’ll end on it’s not only like the process itself that is getting attacked. I think Florida yet was another reminder of how authoritarianism is playing out through the initiative process, and we saw this in multiple states in 2024, where in Florida specifically, there was an abortion reproductive freedom measure on the ballot. The governor threatened to close down TV stations that aired ads in favor of that amendment in 2024. They sent police officers to people’s homes that signed the petition. They, and now this is under investigation, used state funds to mislead voters on the initiative. And so I think it’s not just even the how these things are happening to undermine the will of the people, it is happening through the lens of rising authoritarianism that we’re seeing more and more. And I believe we’re going to continue to see.

Maresa Strano: That’s such a good point, Chris. And it reminds me that these attacks on the initiative process and the kind of automatic attempts to overturn laws that are approved by voters is part and parcel of this greater, longer trend to restrict the access to the ballot box. So those same legislators, those same elected officials who are now trying to dismantle or defang the process are the ones who were sponsoring and voting in favor of those laws that, you know, especially in recent years, we have seen, especially, you in 2020 and in 2022 to block access to the ballot box for voters that they thought were not going to vote their way.

Shannon Lynch: So, looking into the future here, kind of a two-pronged question, what further attacks do you think that we’ll see against the process, the ballot initiative process, but also what efforts do you think that will see on behalf of the voters, types of issues that they might approach with ballot initiatives over the next, let’s say, five, 10 years?

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Listen, for people like me, whose work is day in and day out is on ballot measures, we’re in an existential threat right now. What is happening across the country with the future of our democracy, it touches ballot measures, for all those examples that I gave you. There could be a future where we don’t have the—a near future—where maybe we have on books, on paper, the initiative process, but because essentially, these state legislators, and Missouri is a very good example, do not care, do not feel beholden to the people that they are supposed to represent in government, it wouldn’t matter, right? They just did that in Missouri.

And I think in a time where there is so much distrust, this is something that we really have to be careful and watch out for because we don’t want to sow further distress, but I think that’s also an opportunity. For people to rise up, fight back, and say, whoa, wait a minute, we just did a thing, right? We just raised the minimum wage in our state. We just protected abortion rights. This isn’t sitting well with me. And that is, I think, how resistance fights back. And it’s so critical to what Maresa has said about the coalition of people that we can bring together across differences. I think it's something really important.

And then I think, you know, as we look into the future, you know, we’re already starting to see moving from not only thinking about reproductive freedom, but thinking about protecting LGBTQ plus rights and what does bodily autonomy look like. I think about the fiscal cliff that states are facing. And I think really about this economy of care and what does it look like to have a more care-based economy is something to look out for in the future. And we are going to have to continue to build off that progress of re-imagining our democracy, whether it’s proportional representation and other efforts. I saw some excitement from Maresa. We also have to continue this experiment of democracy and what does it really look like for the future. So I think those are some of the things to look forward to in the future

Maresa Strano: I knew you would end on a more optimistic note. You had me a little worried there for a second. I always bring it back. You always bring it back. I know in political reform, we all have to be cautious optimists. I actually think that the future looks somewhat bright. Now, not only are all the democracy defenders and crusaders like BISC and the Fairness Project and people working in their communities all over the country working to defend their processes against attacks, they’re also becoming more proactive about strengthening their processes to make them more resilient to future attacks. And in doing so, raising awareness about the systems, where they’re useful and maybe where they are not so useful.

Ballot initiatives are not the perfect instrument to resolve every policy dispute. And in fact, one of my kind of pitches as kind of a one-time skeptic, although I did work for Ballotpedia for many years, is that ballot initiatives should be used to strengthen representation and our institutions representation so that we don’t need to rely on them so much. They do wonderful things, but we shouldn’t have to do all this work. That’s what we elect our representatives to do.

So, I think what we will see is Mississippi’s system will be reinstated. Chris, you touched on that before, but Mississippi had its system suspended a few years ago after the state passed a marijuana legalization measure. It kicked up this kind of dormant issue that had existed since the 2000 census and reapportionment, which Mississippi lost one of its congressional districts, which created a signature gathering issue, a procedural issue. And in throwing out the marijuana legalization initiative, the courts also said your entire process is inoperable right now. So there are a great group of folks working on that in Mississippi. I think that’ll be reinstated.

And I think we’re going to see expansion. For the first time since 1992, I think, we’re going to see a new state come online. We did a recent analysis of readiness among the states that do not have an initiative process. Chris mentioned she grew up in Texas. There’s no process there. I grew up New York, there’s no process there. You go to Pennsylvania, they don’t have one either.

Wisconsin seems like it might have potential. The governor there has twice proposed the introduction of an initiative process and budget bills. There are several conditions, political, social, economicly, in Wisconsin that make it a promising candidate for kind of near-term adoption. Among them there’s a huge gap between what their government is doing and what the people actually want on a number of issues. And on specific issues, Chris mentioned proportional representation. I think that’s bubbling up from cities. That’s great.

I also think we’re going to see more initiatives on AI policy, and legislators are going to be confused and don’t wanna deal with it. And sometimes they pass the buck to citizens to untie some of and untangle some of those confusing new issues. So, I think those are, those are the ones I’m looking out for.

Ultimately, again, I am pretty confident that the system will be more widespread and more accessible going forward, but with the understanding that people will still have to fight very, very hard to protect the system.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, well, I appreciate, you know, the ending on a somewhat up note. You know, I think that we’ve talked about some things that are very concerning, but I think it’s always good to try and look at what could be on the positive side. So, I really appreciate that from both of you. And thank you again so much for joining me for this really great episode.

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo: Thank you for having us.

Maresa Strano: Thank you, Shannon.

Heidi Lewis: This was a New America production. Shannon Lynch is our host and executive producer. Our co-producers are Joe Wilkes, David Lanham, and Carly Anderson. Social media by Maika Moulite. Visuals by Alex Briñas, and media outreach by me, Heidi Lewis. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you like to listen.