This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 25th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Items on Americans' ballots this month included the typical crop of candidates, but voters also

weighed in on ballot issues on how people vote abortion, the separation of

powers, involuntary servitude, and ending some drug prohibition.

Cato's Walter Olson discusses some of the more notable ballot measures

voters faced this year.

When I first heard on the radio that slavery was on the ballot in at least one state, I thought to myself,

this is obviously a profound overstatement and then looking into it

even just at a cursory level not really well many states had allowed under their constitutions involuntary servitude as part of criminal punishment.

And although I don't think this probably had a practical effect.

I haven't looked into it.

There has been a movement to wipe this language off the books

as part of a general cleaning up of outdated things and particularly

things connected with slavery.

So that's just sort of just one example of what was on the ballot in in many states. Do you happen to know how

many states have make it easy to put things on their ballots? It's something like 15 or 18 and the procedures differ a lot at the margin, which is why it's so hard to get an exact number.

Sometimes it's possible to put it on but it's very burdensome to get enough

signatures or the legislature can intervene in certain ways or courts can strike it down very easily, but judging from reform areas that have been popular in the past, such as redistricting reform, there are about a dozen states where the process is highly usable and typically is used a fair bit.

And then there are another half dozen states where it's hard to use and is used at least occasionally,

sometimes on a popular issue like cannabis.

Okay, speaking of cannabis, that issue was on the ballot in several states,

...