A progressive prison reform that was on the ballot in California and Nevada this month met drastically different outcomes after the votes were counted:
In California, voters chose to keep the status quo, allowing “involuntary servitude” to remain legal in prisons. On the other side of the state line, Nevada voters overwhelmingly passed a measure to ban “slavery and involuntary servitude.”
These diverging results in two neighboring states raised questions about whether Nevada voters, a majority of whom supported Donald Trump’s successful bid to return to the White House, are more liberal on criminal justice issues than voters in deep-blue California, where Vice President Kamala Harris won.
Some have suggested that the failure of California’s Proposition 6 reflects a rightward shift in the state, where voters passed Proposition 36, the tough-on-crime measure on the same ballot that will reverse course on progressive reforms they approved a decade earlier.
But a closer examination of the prison measures in California and Nevada reveals two key differences that may explain the surprising outcome.