It’s time to amend NC’s constitutional amendment process

North Carolinians just approved four of the six proposed amendments on this year’s ballot. Now, they will have to wait and see exactly what some of those amendments do. This is because, unlike almost all amendments on the ballot over the last 30 years, this year’s amendment proposals were not accompanied by any implementing legislation. Most of the important details about how the amendments work will be hashed-out during the lame-duck legislative session after Thanksgiving.

But what if voters who supported the amendments don’t like how they are implemented?

This scenario highlights a weakness in North Carolina’s amendment process. As things currently stand under the North Carolina Constitution, all amendment proposals are referred to voters by the General Assembly; it acts as the gatekeeper to the amendment process. North Carolinians who don’t like how these amendments are implemented or are otherwise troubled by unintended consequences, therefore, would have to convince their representatives, many of whom were responsible for approving and implementing the amendments in the first place, to adjust or repeal the measures. It would be a real challenge to persuade enough legislators to reconsider: proposals to repeal the amendments or to alter them in order to guide the legislature’s implementation of them would have to first gain the support of three-fifths of all members in each house of the General Assembly before being submitted to voters for approval.

One reform that could mitigate some of these issues is to incorporate a citizen initiative process into North Carolina’s amendment procedures. The details of the process vary from state to state, but generally the 18 states that provide for citizen-initiated amendments require initiative-backers to obtain support (usually in the form of signatures) from a specified percentage of the general population or voters.

An initiative process would allow the people to place amendment proposals on the ballot without the General Assembly. This serves three related goals. First, it gives citizens a more realistic chance to revisit and revise constitutional changes in light of their actual implementation and effects. Second, the mere threat of citizen initiatives may induce politicians to behave more responsibly and responsively. Finally, it would allow the people to force a recalcitrant government to enact popular policies on which it refuses to act. Redistricting reform, for example, usually enjoys bipartisan support among the public and bipartisan opposition among politicians, which makes it exactly the kind of policy the citizen initiative exits for. Indeed, this year’s election saw voters in three states use the initiative process to end partisan gerrymandering. This is a critical issue in North Carolina, but it is one that the General Assembly has not addressed. An initiative process would allow North Carolinians to take matters into their own hands.

The citizen initiative process is no panacea. Special interest groups can exploit it and the people themselves can abuse it. But it has the virtue of permitting the people to more directly exercise their authorial control over the Constitution and, in turn, government.

Other modest reforms can make the amendment process more representative of the people’s will. Currently, the General Assembly determines when amendment proposals appear on the ballot. Changing the process to restrict amendment votes to general elections only, as 20 states do, would help maximize turnout. Also, adjusting the process so that a proposal must be approved by a majority of all voters in the election – rather than a majority of just those who vote on the amendment, as is currently required in NC – avoids the unfortunate scenario where changes to the NC Constitution are approved only by a minority of voters casting ballots, as happened in 2014.

It is we the sovereign people who ordain and establish the NC Constitution, and, accordingly, we ought to feel free to change it as we deem wise or necessary, as long as we do so pursuant to a deliberative process that is reasonably well-crafted to discern the will of the people. The process surrounding this year’s amendment proposals suggests that perhaps the most important change we can consider is the amendment process itself.

Jim Zink is an associate professor of political science at N.C. State University. The opinions here are his own.