October 9, 2025

lots to state, part 2

Which US state offers the best proving grounds for a mini-public constitutional convention?

Part one of this two-parter took on the question of how best to start making mini-public state constitutional conventions a reality. It explored the idea of a Citizen’s Constitutional Convention Congress, which would propose designs for state and national constitutional conventions. The results would help organize and galvanize a push for constitutional conventions of randomly selected citizens.

Now on to the question of…

Where do we start?

Which state or states are ripest for a successful constitutional convention campaign? Once we have our convention designs, where do we try them out?

Spoiler: I’m thinking Montana. And then Florida. And then the rest. Hear me out.

The lots to amend post pointed out that…

State conventions distinguish themselves from Article V conventions in at least one very important way: they actually happen.

I probably should have said state conventions actually have happened; their momentum has stalled. There have been 233 such conventions, but the last successful one was nearly 40 years ago when Rhode Island voters opted for a convention in an automatic recurring ballot referral. 14 of the 15 states whose constitutions require such referrals dutifully put the convention question to voters, and lately voters have reliably voted “no”. Oklahoma's legislature, however, has neglected the requirement since 1970, when they last put a convention question on the ballot. Dodgy, no?

Other states have come close. A ballot referral in Hawaii in 1996 was approved by voters, and then dis-approved by the State Supreme Court, who decided to count blank ballots as “no” votes. Also dodgy, but the convention idea was back on the ballot again in 1998 and failed unambiguously.

Just last year, Louisiana’s governor pushed for a convention to clean what he considered a messy and outdated constitution. The State House voted for it, but the session ended without a vote from the State Senate. The senators reportedly wanted to know beforehand what changes were intended. That is, they didn't want to call a convention unless they already knew exactly what it was going to decide.

Louisiana is unusual in that it is one of just 5 states where the legislature can call a constitutional convention without voter approval; usually a ballot referral has to green light it. But I suspect their legislators aren't unusual at all in their reluctance to endorse a constitutional convention without knowing exactly what they’re going to get. This kind of thinking is clearly a challenge for advocates of mini-public conventions; nobody knows beforehand what randomly selected conventioneers would decide.

In fact, both of these methods – automatic ballot referrals and legislature-initiated conventions – share a common problem for us; there’s not an obvious place to inject calls for a mini-public format. If Hawaiians had gone through with their 1996 convention, for example, the legislators would have had the power to determine how convention-goers were chosen. So it's not obvious how we could use either method to persuade a state to call the first mini-public convention.

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Happily, there is a third way to call state constitutional conventions: ballot initiatives. Broadly speaking, I’m not the biggest fan of ballot initiatives, because they’re just as susceptible as elections to problematic campaigning, and arguably moreso to obfuscation; they often seem written purposefully to confuse (though I love Oregon's use of mini-publics to address that problem). But there are few better tools than ballot initiatives for circumventing legislators protecting their turf.

In our case, the appeal of ballot initiatives is that the measure itself could specify a convention format. More precisely, it could specify the mini-public convention format that our Citizen’s Constitutional Convention Congress proposes. With ballot initiatives, we can bring the idea of a citizens’ convention directly to the citizens.

(Note that the approach echoes our preferred national Article V convention strategy, in which states’ convention applications would specify a mini-public format. In both cases, the idea is to define the format upfront, preempting legislators' chances to hijack the process.)

The map¹ below shows how the three routes for calling conventions are distributed across the US.

It looks considerably more complicated than just "three routes", because:

1. The legislature-initiated route is broken into three groups (majority + ballot, supermajority + ballot, and supermajority only).
2. Some states have no method for calling conventions method formally specified in their constitution. (Though some among them have called conventions nonetheless via their legislatures.)
3. Many states allow multiple routes.

So, even though it might take you a sec to parse all that, you will eventually see that just four states allow for ballot initiatives: Florida, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

These four states most obviously cluster into (a) Florida and (b) the other three. Florida has the third largest population in the US, a big, bloated constitution and, recently, a man charged with killing and eating his two pet peacocks. The other three are each among the country’s eight smallest in population, sport relatively lightweight constitutions, and have no prominent pavonicide.

Florida, with its raucous politics, its huge, diverse population, and its general distractibility, would make an awfully daunting place to launch a first campaign for a mini-public constitutional convention. It would be easier to start smaller, quieter, and less swampy.

Of the northern three, Montana sticks out a bit. It’s more mountainous, less midwestern. It’s the only one of the three that has adopted a new constitution after its original. And it’s a bit more politically balanced; the Cook Partisan Voting Index, a measure of political lean, puts Montana at R+10 (10 points more Republican than the US as a whole), and the Dakotas at R+15 (North) and R+18 (South). While I don’t have in mind an ideal partisan lean for proof-of-concept state conventions, there’s an argument to be made for a red-but-not-too-red state. If mini-publics become a blue thing or a red thing, they won’t work as a whole thing. Given their support in academia, their higher adoption in blue states to date, and the fact that they may be perceived as a European import, some red counterweight would be valuable.

The 1972 convention that adopted Montana’s current constitution sticks out a bit, too. It included the highest percentage of female delegates of any constitutional convention in US history, for example. And the document's Declaration of Rights (34 of them!) included an unusual Right of Participation intended to increase citizen engagement in government. That right has been interpreted narrowly by their courts; perhaps the next constitution could clarify and strengthen it.

Montana is also the only state in the country where you can employ all three different methods for triggering a convention: legislature, ballot initiative, or automatic ballot referral. Their automatic referrals take effect every 20 years. The last one, in 2010, failed when only 42% of voters opted for a constitutional convention. I say "only", but that’s the closest a convention ballot has come to succeeding since New Hampshire’s vote narrowly missed in 2002. There's an appetite.

There is also, admittedly, a sizable problem: Montana's constitution specifies that convention delegates must be elected. But, critically, the constitution can be amended by ballot initiative. If we're already in for one ballot initiative campaign, why not make it a double? One to amend the state constitution to allow mini-public conventions, the other to call one. In both cases, we need the signatures of 10% of Montana's fewer-than-eight-hundred-thousand registered voters to get on the ballot. Just 80,000 signatures on each of two measures would get this rolling.

I'm not saying Helena or bust, but on the face of it Montana seems like a leading candidate. They can call constitutional conventions via a ballot initiative, our best-shot convention route. They have a taste for constitutional conventions, relatively speaking. They're sparsely populated. They're purply red. They value participation. And they have some gorgeous places for people to get together and talk.

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Success in Montana could spawn a ballot initiative campaign in Florida. Success in Florida could give enough credibility to mini-public conventions to generate interest in states where conventions are called by other routes. And success in a few more citizens' state constitutional conventions could drive interest in bringing citizens' conventions to the national stage.

After the first couple of mini-public conventions, states with automatic ballot referrals will be particularly interesting to watch. The convention question on the ballot next year in Michigan will almost certainly fall ahead of our timeline. But three more states – Connecticut, Hawaii, and Illinois – will ask voters the convention question in 2028. Could the idea of citizens' constitutional conventions have starting catching on by then?

And then 2030 it will be Iowa and Montana’s turn for a ballot referral. Of course Montana, having recently had an extremely successful mini-public convention, may decide it’s too soon to have one again…