What's On the Ballot This Week

With so much at stake in Congress, I had personally forgotten the importance of everything else on the ballot. This FiveThirtyEight article summarizes some of the more relevant ballot measures in play this week:

FiveThirtyEight Ballot Measures

Highlights include:

• Florida Amendment 4 -- Restoring the right to vote to (most) felons who have completed their sentences. This amendment could create ~300,000 new voters.
• Recreational marijuana legalization in Michigan and North Dakota.
• Washington Initiative 1631 -- the first state-level carbon tax.
• Washington Initiative 1639 -- one of the toughest gun safety packages in the country.
• Medicaid expansion in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah.

A lot of these measures are poised to pass, and what's curious is that many of them are liberal initiatives that have gained traction in red states. As Nathaniel Rakich, the author of the article, says:

"These [ballot measures] often fly under the radar because they don’t fall along clear Republican-vs.-Democrat lines, but that’s often why they’re so interesting: They force voters to engage directly with policy rather than fall back on their partisan identity."

Here are a couple of other articles that I've found pretty helpful in understanding ballot measures: 
What's on the Ballot (worksheet)
Missouri and Arkansas Voting to Raise Minimum Wage
Gun Control in Washington

Happy midterms everyone!