Before the Court en banc. Opinion by Justice Hardesty.
In this appeal, the Court considered the proper standard of review to be applied when reviewing the adequacy of a ballot initiative’s description of effect. NRS 295.009, the statute at issue in this appeal, sets forth two requirements that the proponent of a ballot initiative must satisfy: (1) the proposed law must embrace only “one subject,” and (2) when gathering petition signatures, the proponent’s petitions must include, “in not more than 200 words, a description of the effect of the initiative or referendum if the initiative or referendum is approved by the voters.” In resolving whether The Education Initiative PAC’s description of effect for its proposed ballot initiative violated NRS 295.009, the Court examined the function of a description of effect in the initiative process and how a court should analyze a description of effect in reviewing a challenge to the sufficiency of the description. The Court also considered whether the initiative violates the single-subject rule. First, the Court found that because a description of effect serves a limited purpose to facilitate the initiative process, a description of effect must be straightforward, succinct, and a nonargumentative summary of what the initiative is designed to achieve and how it intends to reach those goals. Second, the Court found that the description of effect cannot constitutionally be required to delineate every effect that an initiative will have due to its limited purpose and its 200-word limitation. Thus, the Court held that in reviewing an initiative’s description of effect, a district court must take a “holistic approach” to determine whether the description is a straightforward, succinct, and nonargumentative summary of an initiative’s purpose and how that purpose is achieved, and must also use that approach to determine whether the information contained in the description is correct and does not misrepresent what the initiative will accomplish and how it intends to achieve those goals. Finally, the Court confirmed that a ballot initiative satisfies the single-subject requirement when the initiative’s proposed parts are “functionally related and germane to each other and the initiative’s purpose of subject.” Affirmed in part and reversed in part. (Amanda C. Yen, Associate in the Las Vegas office of McDonald Carano Wilson.)
