The Greater North Dakota Chamber and other powerful lobbyists want you to believe the North Dakota Constitution is too easy to change.
Funny thing is, they already tried to pass Measure 1 themselves. They failed.
The front door was locked in 2022
Let’s go back to 2021. The Chamber started recruiting sponsors for an initiated measure to rewrite how we amend our constitution. Their pitch? Our founding document faces an amendment every election, much of it pushed by out-of-state money, and something had to be done.
So a group called Protect North Dakota’s Constitution hit the road. The measure would have required 60% of the vote to pass future constitutional amendments and limited each one to a single subject. Sound familiar? It should.
They had money. Lots of it. The committee raised about $559,000, and the single biggest check came from the Greater North Dakota Chamber, at $180,000.
They needed 31,164 valid signatures from North Dakotans. They turned in 31,622. Then the Secretary of State’s office tossed 5,738 of them for notary errors, circulator violations, and incomplete entries. Some petitions carried names of people who said they never signed. The measure never made the 2022 ballot.
Six figures from the state’s biggest business lobby in addition to other deep-pocket political donors. Paid circulators. A full year. And they could not find enough real North Dakotans to sign their name to the idea.
That’s not a system that’s too easy. That’s a system working exactly the way it’s supposed to.
So they went around back
When the front door didn’t open, they went around back.
The Legislature doesn’t need signatures. It just needs votes from 141 people, most of whom spend a lot of time with these same lobbyists. In 2025, lawmakers passed House Concurrent Resolution 3003, 65-28 in the House and 33-13 in the Senate. Now it’s Measure 1 on your November ballot.
No clipboards at the State Fair. No knocking on doors. No convincing 32,000 neighbors. Just a couple of committee hearings and a floor vote.
This isn’t the Legislature’s first swing either. In 2024, lawmakers sent voters Measure 2, a package that would have made initiated measures harder in several ways. Voters said no. But, here we are. Again. Because the Legislature, Governor, and lobbyists can’t take “no” for an answer.
Their failure is the argument
Here’s the part the Chamber and other lobbyists doesn’t want you to think about.
If amending the constitution were truly easy, their 2022 measure would be law right now. They had every advantage: money, organization, connections, and a message they believed in. It still failed, because the citizen process demands real work from real people. That’s the point.
Meanwhile, look at what got through. An ethics commission. Term limits.
It’s the hypocrisy. The Chamber tested the system. The system said no. Instead of accepting the answer, they changed the venue and now want to change the rules so the next group that tries faces an even steeper hill than the one they couldn’t climb.
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