So basically to you have two systems because your government is in a spat with the political parties. nice.
Not the government. Elected officials are squarely on the side of the parties (that’s who they are). Ballot initiatives bypass the legislature and the governor here. This one was written, I believe, by the state Grange. So it’d be pretty fairly described as a spat between the state parties and the state population.
state Grange?
Never particularly heard of them either until they ran the initiative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry
Also, this is a bit of a western state phenomenon too. Out here, a guy and thirty friends can get an initiative on the ballot (slight exaggeration). It’s super-easy, which is good when you’re dealing with an issue that every state elected official from both parties violently opposes such as open primaries. But it’s bad in the sense that we get SEVERAL “free ponies for everyone” initiatives every year, which end up in the courts or ignored or whatever. i.e. we get initiatives to cut taxes or improve education without any indication of how to pay for them, and those are treated more like political statements than actual law.
EDIT: Found a reference to the court case: