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Half of the 50 US states allow citizens to write a petition to put a state constitutional amendment or a new state law on the next ballot, called a direct ballot initiative[1].
Any group of citizens can author these proposed laws in 14 states or constitutional amendments in 16 states and each state that allows it has a prescribed process that requires a petition to add the amendment or law to the ballot. That petition must be signed by a certain number or percentage of voters registered in that state within a period prescribed by that state.
If you are prepared to gather enough signatures, this is a workaround for citizens whose elected officials are not responsive to certain wishes of the majority of the registered voters. This is especially valuable when, for example, the state governor and legislative members may have been elected because they were perceived as being the most effective proponents of the voters' top priority, even though the voters had other priorities that the elected officials were not as strong in their endorsement. So, in a state with a governor and legislature that is meeting the voters' wishes on the state economy but who consistently fail to pass laws that curtail easy gun purchase even though voters want that, a ballot measure may succeed where the votes for officials did not.
Some states allow for a ballot veto, that is, a similar process that overturns a particular state statute passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. This is also an additional potential corrective to an elected group of officials who are perceived as great on the voters' top priority but passed a law in another area that voters decide to strike from the books directly, effectively overruling the elected officials on a specific issue.
Whether it's a red state in which the voters buck the national views on women's reproductive rights or a blue state that decides to get tougher on street drugs, this power of direct democracy on the issues allows each state that permits it to create a more nuanced corpus of laws for themselves.
It also allows for citizens to come back to measures they initiated in previous cycles and "tune them up," as the new reality may prompt them to do. In Oregon, for example, one ballot measure practically legalized all drugs. The effects were quite negative--overdose deaths, increasing dereliction--and the voters then used a ballot measure to correct the most egregious aspects.
Like any modality of participating in democracy, it's more work than letting others decide for us, and each variable requires its own decision-making process. If we are willing and able to put in the work, we can participate more and more fully and effectively. Everyone has a bandwidth and thus everyone needs a personal set of priorities to do the work that matters to them.
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