Monopoly: a popular boardgame. Not a popular concept with voters, though.

Monopoly: a popular boardgame. Not a popular concept with voters, though.

Thanks to the GOP's stranglehold on both Congress and the majority of state legislatures around the country, one of the few venues for progressive reform these days is the ballot box itself. In recent elections, progressives have successfully organized at the state level to increase the minimum wage, legalize marijuana, and even expand background checks for gun buyers.

But Republicans have grown wise to this approach and have descended to new lows to prevent liberal ballot measures from passing into law, even when voters back them. And two measures in two states that are on the ballot next week offer good illustrations of the kinds of scummy tricks the GOP is only too happy to deploy to thwart the will of voters.

In Ohio, organizers petitioned to place Issue 3, which would legalize both medical and recreational marijuana, on the ballot. Issue 3 would also allow just 10 farms to grow pot as a means of carefully regulating the plant's production, a system proponents call a "structured oligopoly."

But Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, no friend of the legalization movement, insisted on calling this setup a "monopoly" in the text of the measure that voters will see on their ballots, because he "figured that 'monopoly' was the most easily understandable" term. This bit of chicanery was in fact a deliberate move to sabotage Issue 3, because opponents also succeeded in getting the GOP-controlled legislature to include a competing measure, Issue 2, on the ballot as well.

Issue 2, on its face, has nothing to do with marijuana but rather styles itself as the "anti-monopoly amendment" and would purportedly outlaw "monopolies" like the kind Husted claims Issue 3 would create. Despite the public's general fondness for the board game of the same name, voters typically aren't too fond of monopolies, and scattered polling shows more support for Issue 2 than Issue 3 (which seems to be a tossup). It's a diabolically clever move: Opponents of legalized marijuana want to try to stop any trade in pot by posing as defenders of commerce.

More on this world-class trickery below.