I fucking loathe ballot initiatives.
Oregon has tons of them every year. Their supporters pay people to get signatures. Those people are like vultures. The ballot measures are usually poorly written and when passed they frequently get overturned as being unconstitutional. Frequently two different ballot measures contradict each other. This happened once in Oregon, over nuclear power I think. If the pro-nuclear measure and the anti-nuclear measure both pass, which do you follow?
What ends up happening in the end is that hardly any measure wins approval because people are so overwhelmed with them, as well as finding them confusing, that they just vote no on everything.
When I would go to the University of Oregon bookstore I would stop about 100 feet away and survey the landscape, trying to find the signature hawks. Then I would find the ones occupied with some other poor sucker and head straight for them, hoping I would not be caught. This often worked.
So in summary, I fucking hate ballot initiatives.
Agreed with the ballot-initiative hate. They served a purpose a long time ago in California, but now that the railroads don't run the state they've outlived their usefulness by at least sixty years.
Apart from all the problems you mention, they work to make it nearly impossible to govern California responsibly. Proposition 13 (for example; you can probably come up with a dozen or so others nearly as bad) capped property taxes; you can trace the decline in California's schools and infrastructure directly from that point, but there's no chance that it's going to be repealed in my lifetime.
Right, and Oregon copied Prop 13 soon after, decimating their higher education system just before I was about to enter college.
Hold the hate. Consider: Ballot initiatives are the origin of most reforms, such as women's suffrage (passed in 13 states before Congress went along), direct election of Senators (4 states), publicly financed elections (passed by initiative in 6 of 7 states with them), medical marijuana ( in 8 of 13 states) and increasing minimum wages (in all 6 states that tried in 2006). See http://Vote.org/initiatives for more examples and references. The media have seized on the problem initiatives. They generally kiss up to politicians.
There are problems with initiatives, and solutions have been available for decades:
Voters on ballot initiatives need what legislators get: public hearings, expert testimony, amendments, reports, etc. The best project for such deliberative process is the National Initiative for Democracy, led by former Sen. Mike Gravel: http://Vote.org. Also http://healthydemocracyoregon.org/ and http://cirwa.org
In Switzerland, petitions are left at government offices and stores for people to read and sign at leisure, so there are less aggressive petitioners and you can save your Mace.
Legislators have never tried to improve the ballot initiative process, but often try to make it even harder. They'd rather have absolute power!
In Switzerland, representatives are humbler, after centuries of local and cantonal (state) ballot initiatives, and national initiatives since 1891. They call their system "co-determination." This works well for couples, too!
I'm blogging the initiatives over at Toxic Culture (http://toxicculture.wordpress.com/), and it's a pretty bad set this year, even by CA standards. Initiatives are a mixed bag - one of the big dangers is confusing voters with the sheer number, or with misleading information. The California Voter's Guide is a thing of beauty, from a civic education perspective, but most years it's super overwhelming for the average voter. Democracy is messy - direct democracy doubly so. The financing of these things seems to be a big part of the problem - a sufficient wad of cash is enough to get any nutty idea on the ballot, and more cash will often get you a win.
Thanks Kate, you have some great analysis over there. I agree, certainly, that the financing is key. On one side, you have the bulk of money from one wealthy guy, and the other side, most of it comes from the energy companies. Neither really engender a great deal of trust for me...
But anyway, thanks for letting me know about your ballot initiative analyses-- very sharp stuff!
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