id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
inlawrev-23211	Schwier, Ryan T.	The Marshall Constitution and the Jurisprudence of Article 16	2021	16	.pdf	application/pdf	7685	513	58	”1 Reports had circulated throughout the Statehouse that day that the Indiana Supreme Court would hand down its decision in the highly anticipated case of Ellingham v. Dye.2 After nearly a year and a half of political wrangling, litigation, and appeals, the Court would soon decide the question of whether state constitutional reform by statute and referendum was “a valid exercise of legislative power by the General Assembly. What, precisely, constituted “a majority of the electors” for purposes of ratification?48 In 1880, the Indiana Supreme Court, in State v. Swift, decided that a constitutional amendment must pass by a majority of the electorate as a whole, not just a majority of those voting on the amendment.49 And because a mere plurality of affirmative votes meant neither the ratification nor the rejection of a proposed amendment, the Court concluded that such a proposal stood pending before the voters.50 These “zombie” amendments, if you will—neither fully dead nor fully alive—created further obstacles: so long as they remained in their suspended state, “awaiting the action of a succeeding General Assembly, or of the electors,” article 16, section 2 prevented legislators from introducing new ones.51 Lawmakers could resubmit these zombie amendments at a subsequent election, but the usual practice was to remove them by legislative act to open the door for other proposals.52 Of course, this latter process forced legislators to start the article 16 process anew.	cache/inlawrev-23211.pdf	txt/inlawrev-23211.txt