Arizona is on track for an election showdown next year over the fate of voting access and direct democracy after Republican legislators voted to refer two measures to the ballot that would, respectively, restrict the scope of future citizen-led ballot initiatives and make it easier for GOP lawmakers to overturn voter-approved laws. The twin moves come just as Democrats are gearing up to put their own measures on the ballot that would veto new voting restrictions passed by Republican lawmakers earlier this year.

The GOP’s first amendment would limit voter initiatives to a single subject, a requirement that many states, particularly in the western U.S., have enacted in part to combat “logrolling” that combines an unpopular policy with one or more unrelated popular ones.

The merits of this requirement aside, it’s been interpreted very differently by the courts. The Michigan Supreme Court, for instance, allowed a 2018 redistricting reform package with multiple related planks to go before voters as a single measure. In 2006, however, Florida’s highest court took the single-subject rule to an extreme, saying that a proposed amendment that would both establish a new redistricting commission and set down new requirements for how districts would be drawn violated the rule—and knocked the initiative off the ballot.

The question therefore is whether Arizona’s Supreme Court will adopt an approach more like Michigan’s or more in tune with Florida’s. Reformers have reason to worry, though, since Republican Gov. Doug Ducey packed the court in 2016 by adding two seats to ensure hardline conservative control.

The GOP’s second amendment, meanwhile, would weaken Arizona’s unusually strong law, known as the Voter Protection Act, that makes it difficult for lawmakers to modify voter-approved laws, which voters adopted in 1998 after the legislature overturned an initiative to legalize medical marijuana that had been passed two years earlier.

The VPA allows changes to laws adopted by initiative only if the legislature can muster a three-fourths supermajority, with the key requirement that any such changes must “further the purpose” of the original law—meaning that a law passed at the ballot box can only be overturned at the ballot box. But the GOP’s new amendment would, if it passed, enable the legislature to make significant changes to voter-approved laws with simple majorities if a federal or state court rules even just part of such a law unconstitutional.

That change would let Republicans set their sights on dismantling another 1998 initiative called the Clean Elections Act, which established a vigorous public campaign finance regime and ethics rules for state elections. In a 5-4 ruling in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatives struck down part of the act that gave publicly financed candidates larger sums if any rivals engaged in major self-funding, but the court otherwise left most of the law intact and insulated from GOP interference. Consequently, if voters approve this latest amendment, Republicans could target the Clean Elections Act and potentially many other voter-approved laws in ways that undermine their purpose.

Arizona is just one of many states in the past decade where Republicans have tried to enact new voting restrictions and gerrymanders, then tried to make ballot initiatives harder after voters resorted to direct democracy in the face of GOP efforts to sabotage representative democracy. The 2022 elections represent a continuation of that trend, since Arizona Democrats have launched a veto referendum effort that, if it makes it onto the ballot, would block the GOP’s recently adopted law ending the permanence of Arizona’s mail voting list until voters have a chance to weigh in next year.

Democrats are also attempting to veto Republican legislation that stripped Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ power to settle voting rights lawsuits and instead transferred that power to GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich—but only until their terms end next year. Additionally, they are trying to block a new Republican-backed law that bans private grants for election administration after philanthropic groups gave hundreds of millions nationally in 2020 to address chronic underfunding, along with so-called “ballot security” measures pushed by Trump-fueled conspiracy theorists that could compromise voter privacy.

However, Republicans have so far been unable to put two other ballot initiative restrictions on the 2022 ballot after advancing them in the legislature earlier this year. Those proposals would have required 60% voter support for ballot initiatives instead of the current simple majority, as well as a two-thirds supermajority for voters to raise taxes.